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Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

erikbern.com

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Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#81

Post by breischl »

I tend to agree with this. I do think that this article (as with most) brushes far too easily over the tension between tech debt and new features.

It's not uncommon to have a product person (or even team) that spend tons of time doing analysis to find high-value features. When they show up with some slick Powerpoint/Excel thing that says "If we build this feature we make $BIGNUM", it's extremely difficult for some dev (or dev manager) to come up with an effective counterargument for working on tech debt. Partially because it's not their main job, and partially because quantifying the impact of tech debt is extremely difficult. And it's very easy for that to happen every single planning cycle, even while everyone makes appropriate noises about tech debt being super important and we're totally gonna address that but we just can't justify not going for that $BIGNUM cash first!

I wish I had a solution for that - I don't. If anybody else does I'd love to hear it. :)

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#82

Post by pnutjam »

hrktb wrote: post #68
schnevets wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always believed telecommuting needs the remote equivalent of the golf course. There are certain human elements that cannot be built over a Zoom call, but do not inherently require a physical presence. I have never started a company and I was hire #76 at my current place, but if I were to start something remote, I would find a game or hobby appreciated by all the founders and make sure that remained a bedrock of…

I see the good intention behind all of these, but also feel there is the other side that is too often overlooked. Going on golf courses together, dining with the team etc. are the traditional recipes to create trust. But it's walking that fine line between personal and professional life, while also bridging the technical abilities parts and the personal chemistry parts. I understand we are all human and personal feel…

This traditional method is also what contributes to the "glass ceiling" and the "old boys network". As a hispanic with a non-hispanic name, I've certainly noticed some people react poorly me.

While outright racism is rare, I often see a sort of "you can't be better then me" or maybe a "you think you're better then me" attitude.

Maybe it has more to do with my personality then my looks, but it seems to overlap with in person meeting vs virtual.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#83

Post by pnutjam »

bobbytherobot wrote: post #57

I learned a lesson about opportunity costs while worked at an IT company. When I started, the company managed the IT for small companies, most being three to five people companies. We had full control of decisions so we kept them up-to-date with the latest best practices. I'm sure there was a bias of the types of companies who went with us as we charged more than competitors. We started to gain larger clients. We tho…

This is so true. I've been in plenty of small business that are trying to do the best and their constraints are usually based on the ability of early hires.

Big companies have inertia to deal with for every change and once you get burned by something trivial that gets blamed for problems, you get very shy about improvements.

I'm in the process of building a system that had to make alot of compromises based on existing expectations. It's probably a year away from being where I want it to be because every change is so slow...

It's frustrating to defend these decisions every time someone comes along and notices how hard it is to use the system. I have to explain that every part of the system is broken out currently to find issues and fix them, the end goal is to stack everything together, but right now all the sausage making is on display and frankly it's appalling...

(edited for readability) end goal is turning a push button system that had to be carefully monitored for breakage (while it was running after hours) into a staged system that gets checked and verified during business hours, but still fires off after hours.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#84

Post by pnw_hazor »

trwhite wrote: post #8

You often hear people in engineering teams say something to the effect of "I can't understand why this was built this way. It's been done stupidly", but invariably there's some key piece of contextual information that's missing like, as you say, there simply wasn't enough time. I also wrote about this recently: https://timwhite.digital/building-software-sharing-knowledge

Even though I had plenty of experience in leadership roles, I preferred to join startups as a senior dev. Later, after I understood the lay of the land, I would move into leadership roles as needed.

This helped me develop relationships with other devs, QA, ops, etc. Also, I could learn or discover the reasoning behind trade offs and compromises that were made before I proposed changes.

One time I went direct into a director/manager lead role. It was a nightmare, some on the team thought I didn't know what I was talking about -- even though they were not using source control until I brought it up during my interview. They had not been exposed to professional software development before my arrival and took little stock in my advice/leadership.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#85

Post by 7532yahoogmail »

There's a lot to like in this article. I like how the author tries to remove manipulative motions (correspondingly paranoia) from the context in hopes people can see truer. Nontheless (I am 25+ years in software dev),

- some 20pct of people think the office is where politics and games are played. Thus they try to play it better. That's because openness at the office is usually quite low. Such people are unmoved by push back thinking themselves the smarter, grayer haired guy. Survivors of this kind of BS actually are smart, and do have experience with effective but distorting coping skills

- software should be a formal science. It's not almost all the time

- the chief issue unaddressed here but smartly lead up to is the management function: as the normal scenario is that resources are vastly drwafed by problems what do we say no to?

The management question when examined is complex and when it unfolds to systemic issues that are chiefly human not technical viz any of the corporate histories on quality improvement in the 80s/90s esp with company turnarounds. Ex. Detroit, Xerox, IBM under gerstner. While technical issues remain on the table, sustained under performance is ultimately rooted in management and company culture.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#86

Post by WalterBright »

frandroid wrote: post #52

Y'all missing the most important paragraph in the whole article: > I spent many years working in a satellite office. A lot of the time when I had some deep technical disagreement about something, I'd fly to the main HQ, and go out for dinner with the other team. I wouldn't even talk about technology, just about random stuff. Once they knew me, and realize I was a human (and not a faceless blob), most technical disagr…

That's a big reason why we have an annual D conference. The D community is distributed world-wide, and it's a huge benefit to simply have a beer with people you'd otherwise only know by their online handle. It's amazing how disagreements just vanish.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#87

Post by WalterBright »

sacks2k wrote: post #77
hrktb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the good intention behind all of these, but also feel there is the other side that is too often overlooked. Going on golf courses together, dining with the team etc. are the traditional recipes to create trust. But it's walking that fine line between personal and professional life, while also bridging the technical abilities parts and the personal chemistry parts. I understand we are all human and personal feel…

"But it's walking that fine line between personal and professional life, while also bridging the technical abilities parts and the personal chemistry parts." This is called networking and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. I'm a consultant and I get along very well with the director of engineering where I'm working now. When cuts happen, I won't be the first to go. The first to go will be the people that hav…

> This is called networking and I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

It's never going away. It's human nature to trust and favor the people you know over those you don't.

A friend of mine who was one of the top salesmen in his outfit would eat his lunch at his desk to save money. But he wasn't getting promoted, while others were. He eventually realized the "do lunch" socializing with coworkers was essential to success.

The idea is to adapt to reality, it's far easier than to try to change human nature.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#88

Post by vageli »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #60
schnevets wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always believed telecommuting needs the remote equivalent of the golf course. There are certain human elements that cannot be built over a Zoom call, but do not inherently require a physical presence. I have never started a company and I was hire #76 at my current place, but if I were to start something remote, I would find a game or hobby appreciated by all the founders and make sure that remained a bedrock of…

This is a huge opportunity. It would serve a great need to create a structured, low-pressure activity for potential business partners to participate in as they socialize over video chat. Given the potential to democratize socializing to form business partnerships, it would catch on all on its own as a way to be inclusive during the pandemic in a way that golf never was. Semi-related, I was reading a sociological rese…

> He was trying to explain why most card players weren't gambling seriously and I think he was right about structured activities providing a social lubricant analogous to alcohol.

I don't have any research to support this but I have come to the same conclusions on my own organizing social events at the workplace. I've found that working on a common goal-oriented task which requires communication is an amazing medium to get people talking. The conversations start around the goal and eventually move outside of the task and into more casual conversation. But having that base that requires communication (think like "pass the ball" in soccer) is required.

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#89

Post by voldacar »

schnevets wrote: post #59
frandroid wrote: post #52

Y'all missing the most important paragraph in the whole article: > I spent many years working in a satellite office. A lot of the time when I had some deep technical disagreement about something, I'd fly to the main HQ, and go out for dinner with the other team. I wouldn't even talk about technology, just about random stuff. Once they knew me, and realize I was a human (and not a faceless blob), most technical disagr…

I've always believed telecommuting needs the remote equivalent of the golf course. There are certain human elements that cannot be built over a Zoom call, but do not inherently require a physical presence. I have never started a company and I was hire #76 at my current place, but if I were to start something remote, I would find a game or hobby appreciated by all the founders and make sure that remained a bedrock of…

you could have a company minecraft server

Re: Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost

#90

Post by tehlike »

chris_st wrote: post #54
tehlike wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And probably the moment you do it, he'd take all the credit from you too.

Well, no, he wasn't that much of a jerk, thankfully.

Good. When you said manipulative, it suddenly brought back memories :)
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