Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

cutlefish.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 259 posts

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#91

Post by rawgabbit »

tuckerpo wrote: post #52

This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article. If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward…

Very true. As an added detail, I see it comes in waves. New CTO/CIO brings in his trusted lieutenants who then bring in their trusted people. They may excel at XYZ but at your company those skills are irrelevant. Some folks who are already on staff hitch their wagon to the new powers that be. These johnny-come-latelys are also insufferable. The game continues until the CTO/CIO is let go and another house cleaning begins. During the meantime, you wonder how any real work gets done.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#92

Post by hinkley »

kerblang wrote: post #83
hinkley wrote: post #16

I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one. If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3. I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill…

I agree: It's not 75%. But you're suddenly substituting the word "brilliant" for "pragmatic" and that's kinda questionable. It might be that you define brilliant differently than some others, so that IQ is much less significant than pragmatism itself in your equation of brilliance; but if you think IQ -> pragmatic, I disagree. I think they're orthogonal.

Yeah that might have been a poor word choice or projection on my part.

As I replied elsewhere, I feel I am in this quadrant and I often actively look for sympathetic people among bosses and peers to talk to about it. If there are more than ten people I have someone to talk to, but it’s never been anywhere near 75%. And one time I got a very rude awakening when I discovered several of those people were all sizzle and no sausage.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#93

Post by hinkley »

vkou wrote: post #34
hinkley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity. But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.

Unless they are given meaningful equity, it's not their ship, and regardless of whether it is or isn't, unlike the shareholders and creditors, they won't be sinking with it. If you want worker interests to be even a little aligned with owner interests, the correct corporate structure is not an S corp, or a C corp, it is some flavor of worker co-op. And even then, it can't grow too big.

People get invested in their work. And there are a lot of software people who make their work part of their identity, and so when they are accused of doing bad work they take is as a personal attack.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#94

Post by godelski »

hinkley wrote: post #21
luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity. But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.

The part I'm confused at is it doesn't seem that they are doomed, and end up being very successful companies. But I think this is likely due to lack of competition.

I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they were measuring their performance was wrong and could tell they overfit their data. They didn't believe me. But then it came to be affecting my role. So I fixed it, showed them, and then they were like "oh thanks, but we're moving on to transformers now." Main part of what I did is actually make their model robust and actually work on their customer data! (I constantly hear that "industry is better because we have customers so it has to work" but I'm waiting to see things work like promised...) Of course, their transformer model took way more to train and had all the same problems, but were hidden a few levels deeper due to them dramatically scaling data and model size.

I knew the ML research community had been overly focused on benchmarks but didn't realize how much worse it was in production environments. It just seems that metric hacking is the explicitly stated goal here. But I can't trust anyone to make ML models that themselves are metric hackers. The part that got me though is that I've always been told by industry people that if I added value to the company and made products better that the work (and thus I) would be valued. I did in an uncontestable manner, and I did not in an uncontestable way. I just thought we could make cool products AND make money at the same time. Didn't realize there was far more weight to the latter than the former. I know, I'm naive.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#95

Post by riskable »

godelski wrote: post #94
hinkley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men. A company that doesn’t know what’s broken is doomed to mediocrity. But some people want to play music while the ship sinks. So they arrange for the most pleasant rest of the voyage they can, instead of saving as many people as they can.

The part I'm confused at is it doesn't seem that they are doomed, and end up being very successful companies. But I think this is likely due to lack of competition. I recently did an internship at one of these big companies, doing ML. I'm a researcher but had a production role. Coming in everything was really weird to me from how they setup their machines to training and evaluation. I brought up that the way they wer…

> due to lack of competition.

So let's compete! What are they selling? What prevents competitors from springing up?

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#96

Post by hinkley »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #66
hinkley wrote: post #16

I don’t think I can agree that 75% of the workforce falls into one quadrant. Particularly this one. If I’m very lucky the semi space contains 60% of my coworkers, if I’m unlucky (or arrive after the writing is on the wall) it’s more like 1/3. I suspect part of the confusion is that there are some people with enough political acumen to appear like frustrated agents of change without actually having the drive or skill…

I don't even think Pragmatists are "smart", or if they are it shows it self in the non-book ways. I'd be more inclined to describe them as "clever". If you've heard the "Smart, and gets stuff done" ideal, they're more of the latter.

I would propose it’s the old “wisdom vs intelligence” problem.

The pragmatist has a better grasp on can vs should.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#97

Post by diob »

zer00eyz wrote: post #32
luisgvv wrote: post #7

I began as a junior dev and climbed up the ranks til the point where I became the SME in some areas of the product. Got laid off because sales goals were not met while they retained people which I think were incompetent in their work. Even some guys which I think were better and more critical to the projects were dumped. I'm not climbing that ladder by being proactive and "pragmatic" again... Call me a paycheck steal…

Did you get cut cause "we need a number" and you're expensive? Were you the growth guy when they need run the busies blood and guts people? Did they save 2 people in some other department who matter more with some horse trading? You can go and be a clock puncher. It's perfectly fine to do so. I know plenty of them, some got laid off recently and cant seem to find jobs. The high achiever's the go the extra mile types…

Might want to think a bit about survivorship bias and see how it might apply.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#98

Post by AlexandrB »

WalterBright wrote: post #79
dakiol wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just give me some JIRA ticket and let me read books while I get my job done in 1-2 hours a day. Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already?

> Aren't we all (normal and decent people) doing this already? I've known many such in my career. They weren't fooling anybody. Everybody knew who they were. When they'd get laid off or were passed over for a raise they were always baffled and outraged.

Uh huh. The more common case is they get promotion and raises like everyone else while sometimes producing -ve value. Even if there's a comeuppance one day, this can go on for years before there are any consequences.

Re: The biggest source of waste is untapped skilled pragmatists

#100

Post by hinkley »

Rustwerks wrote: post #70
klabb3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll be you ten bucks they got rid of people who bring up bad news and kept the yes-men I’m pretty cynical and assumed this was how layoffs worked but at least in faang and even smaller (maybe 500 people) SV companies, I actually don’t think this is the case anymore. Most I’ve seen have been extremely random – it seems like they cut teams/orgs very differently but on an individual level it seems random. I got the i…

This is a legal thing. If you do a layoff it's for business reasons and you can avoid all of the PIP and such. But if you do it that way you can't select based upon performance.

Isn’t this why some people are so into performative work? In a layoff the people they suspect might be underperforming go onto the list. They keep the people who look good on paper, the ones who play the game.

Not the “untapped” people the author is talking about.

Post reply on HN