Why is this so far up on hacker news? It's 3 paragraphs of groundless whining and self-promotion with absolutely no substance.
Give me a second, let me check the "reason" field next to each upvote in the HN database real quick.
No-one knows what they are doing
51–60 of 187 posts
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#52I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling pretty well.
https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397
"Couldn't read the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#53I’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…
I’ve been fairly close to the digitalisation agenda in UK public sector, and apart from pockets, I find it hard to be so generous.
Horrible outsourcing deals with the usual suspects and enormous failed programmes are still the default.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#54I stopped reading the original article when the OP started including politics.
Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past.
It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP.
What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#55I’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…
Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of ill thought out decisions. To such a degree that the people in charge of it are either dumb or have ulterior motives. Having worked with bureaucrats as an external consultant and as someone that provided information to the answers for minister questions, I have a much different opinion of our dear bureaucrats. They might be smart, but it has no impact on th…
Sometimes the idea is to do things wrong and then use that experience to do things correctly later and if possible use events to sweep aside the current political order.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> 3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.
Whoa there. There are plenty of very small governments that have plenty of flailing and tyranny. In the limit, if government is just one guy, he clearly won't have clue about 99% of what he's doing, and will be extremely easy to corrupt since he has no-one else to hold him accountable.
If you want to have even a chance of having a competent government you need at least three fully independent branches of government with their own internal systems of accountability.
I could just as easily argue that you need to maximize the size of the government.
The problem is you hit issues both at the small and the large end. It's like goldilocks. You shouldn't minimize or maximize. You should aim at just the right size for the country/region you're trying to govern.
What's WAY, WAY more important is HOW you govern.
What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller. I guess so much time has passed since the various parts of our government was set up that we've kind of forgotten why the government is the way it is.
Not that we shouldn't have a process that trims down parts of government that has become redundant. But we should have a deep understanding of the problem that part of the government is solving before doing so.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#57Some people do , but they're the minority, and you might not even notice them in the crowd. I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers. Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science a…
I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt work.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#58I’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 i…
Another one I’ve seen is interpreting the statement “if you have an imposter syndrome, you can’t be an imposter” as “if you feel like an imposter, you can’t be an imposter”. I’m sure that approach can have the effect of temporarily helping someone’s self-esteem, but it’s based on highly questionable reasoning.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#59I’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…
I think this largely depends on the definition of "know".
E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.
The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".
And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.
So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.
Re: No-one knows what they are doing
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
>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
That seems like a very bold premise to me.