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No-one knows what they are doing

successfulsoftware.net

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Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#31

Post by [deleted] »

kortilla wrote: post #17
EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

> be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans That’s “not knowing what you’re doing” and not really different from “fake it until you make it” either. If you don’t have a really concrete plan to achieve a certain goal, you quite literally don’t know what you’re doing.

[deleted]

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#32

Post by hermitcrab »

yieldcrv wrote: post #6

People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product. Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing. Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is…

Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#33

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find.

I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing.

I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#34

Post by thathndude »

thom wrote: post #4

Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice. The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can domin…

This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#36

Post by hyperpallium2 »

EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children. But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible, and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a pleasure to read.

They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#37

Post by NewEntryHN »

EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation and you know exactly the correct course of action. This is not the case for most things in adult life (especially politics), in which every problem is a new problem, for which you use heuristics to converge to a solution, that isn't perfect, but at least tries something out.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#38

Post by rockbruno »

hkon wrote: post #23

Having worked many places and looked at various technical solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how perspective. I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.

Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article is about. Running a business and having software engineering prowess are two different problem areas.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#39

Post by spupe »

EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

> A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it.

Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.

Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.

Re: No-one knows what they are doing

#40

Post by smitty1e »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #36
EnKopVand wrote: post #5

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the…

Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children. But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible, and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a…

> They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

1. Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.

2. Restated: people scale poorly.

3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.

4. We seem to trend the opposite direction from (3).

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