Fields where it matters, fields where you can thrive on BS alone, and in between(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu) |
Fields where it matters, fields where you can thrive on BS alone, and in between(statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu) |
You can BS your way even to High journals as an academic. You cannot fall, unless you are cancelled. There is little downside once you made your way in.
In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your audience.
Then there are the financial advisors. Last time I talked to one, the selling point was nothing but "trust us, we have a team of Ph.Ds."
[1] Check out people like skybridge capital as the most high-profile example https://skybridge.com/
[2] See for instance Buffett's bet against Protege Partners https://www.wallstreetphysician.com/warren-buffett-bet-sp-50...
[3] eg Bramdean's spectacular losses on Madoff https://www.ft.com/content/ea15b152-72f4-11de-ad98-00144feab...
The fact that would most likely be fraud and a breach of fiduciary duty for one thing[1].
[1] See for example https://gowlingwlg.com/en/insights-resources/articles/2015/i... The example they cite is from a closed-end fund but the same principle would apply to a hedge fund
In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them.
I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.
Everything was "difficult" and "required analysis". The code mostly worked, but was full of workarounds that would not have been there if someone spent half an hour reading the library documentation.
One thing they didn't do though was stick their head out too much as that was too great a risk to their cushy positions.
Why do they do that, one might ask? Turns out they're either busy with house renovation or have some kind of engaging hobby which takes most of their time.
I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong.
My advice: many "quiet bullshitters" want to do better, but lack the tools, support and ability to do so. They're not trying to take everyone for a ride, but they feel backed into a corner with no way out and they can't ask for help without great personal risk (either real or perceived).
Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload. Maybe he was downplaying the other rest of time that didn't feel like he worked at all even though he was in meetings and doing other BS the company required him to do.
An experienced engineer with many products under their belt and tons of coaching of others on their track record will easily tell if someone knows what they're doing, especially if they get to pair program together for even 30 minutes.
(Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies they're applying to were founded by students doing the opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals -- they were experimenting and building.)
Ideally we have this by code review, which should, theoretically, filter out the bullshit, but software development, as the original post in this thread says, may be overwhelmingly populated by bullshitters or people who honestly don't know their own lack of ability.
This is exaggerated by agism and completely discounting audited real experience over leetcode and small take home projects.
Another unpopular opinion; I’ve resorted to BSing these days cause let’s be real; vast majority of these startups are just fiat wealth rockets, hooking people on nation state scrip
This whole thread just feels like low effort coder bro chest bumping. Low effort appeal to non-existent authority.
What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)?
We’re just high priests avoiding real work of keeping ourselves alive.
I'll admit that my profession is no more noble than say, a carpenter, and is primarily to fund my desired lifestyle. But I don't work at a startup and I don't make startup money and I'm certainly not a coder bro (after my time). I can't say I've "resolved" any real human problems either, but I do occasionally try to do something to help. Over the years I've coached youth sports, tutored reading and math for underprivileged or ESL kids, collected food for the local food bank, played harmonica in a jug band at the local old-folks home, taught after-school bike repair, do roadside cleanup, and was going to do books for inmates but it got cancelled due to COVID. And lest you think I'm trying to get into heaven this all comes from my cold dead atheist heart in the chest doing all that bumping. ;^)
My eyes cannot roll any harder.
At a new company with a higher salary. My richest friends are all like this.
That not happening suggests that "BS" is good enough for most companies in which case why should you bust your ass doing any better when it's just more work for yourself and is unlikely to get rewarded adequately?
If they're offering "market-rate" salary then they can get "market-rate" quality, and if BS became the new "market-rate" then I don't see anything wrong with that.
The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
Combining the above they will move from project to project and position to position once a year or sometimes two years leaving the team or some poor soul who was recently promoted to take over their mess. Then when the project continues to fail they can shake their head to their boss and say, "Everything was on track when I left project. They must have really gone away from the original design for this to happen."
As an aside, I always find this to be a funny example, because it's the kind of requirement that reeks of design mistakes (either UI design or code design). How did we end up in a place where a button was 1 pixel out of alignment? It can happen innocently enough with a true "defect", I've seen it, but more often it indicates either A) designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time or B) engineers are not using reusable styling frameworks/components.
Either way, ending up with a tiny task because a button is 1px out of place probably means you have been wasting hours of work and will continue to waste hours of work if you don't fix it the long way. Doesn't necessarily mean I would stretch that particular ticket out to a week, but I would certainly take a little bit of extra time to make sure we didn't have to fix the exact same problem again next week.
This is happening at my company. We had built a whole UI library and then the new UI design team came in and started designing everything with zero regard to our existing library. It has been a shitshow.
Bonus points because product likes their new designs more than the premade library, so they are fighting hard to throw out the library. Which we basically just finished building.
Woohoo!
You will never be punished for shipping, and always punished for not-shipping.
>"The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."
They are missing the point. You don't need to fool everyone all the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough.
I believe tech falls in the in between category. We all know that one person who is actually incompetent, but somehow has enchanted management. He might climb the ranks or get the good graces for a short time, jumping ship just at the right time.
Sure, in the long term everyone will realize this game, but the long term might not matter much. If you worked at the right time (let's say a long and strong bull market), player your cards right and got lucky, you might cash out and retire early before everyone gets wary of your BS.
Man, you're portraying it as if it were easy to judge your employees. But it's not.
> Playing the markets is about as real as a game can get. There is, of course, a divergence between expectations and outcomes, but the outcome has an inexorable quality about it. In most social situations---in politics and in personal and business relations---it is possible to deceive oneself and others. In the financial markets, the actual results do not leave much room for illusions. The financial markets are very unkind to the ego: those who have illusions about themselves have to pay a heavy price in the literal sense. It turns out that a passionate interest in the truth is a good quality for financial success.
The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
This isn't to say that you're incorrect about macro investing, just that there are niches in such fields in which plenty of incompetent BS peddlers flourish.
What is BS? Being objectively wrong? How would we know that someone is objectively wrong or right eg in Finance (one of the fields mentioned)? Markets can stay irrational for longer than someone is alive - what does it mean for markets to be irrational from their perspective? Merton and Scholes received the Nobel Prize for their finance theories, yet the hedge fund they ran explicitly based on those theories collapsed spectacularly. Does this conclusively prove that their theory was BS, or were they just unlucky to catch a low probability event with a strategy that 'objectively' had a positive expectation (just playing devil's advocate here)? Let's look at another field OP mentioned where we should be able to say what's objectively true, science. Hendrik Lorentz's theories on how light travels through ether were objectively wrong (for all we know), yet they lead to special relativity. Does this make him a BS artist or not? Would the answer change if Einstein hadn't come along?
It seems that OP's argument would have been far less convincing if he'd bothered to try to be exact about his definitions instead of relying on the gut feeling that we all know what BS means. If the argument seems appealing, then the reason for that might lie more in the mind of the reader (who wouldn't like to rise above supposed BS artists?) than in insights about the world. Which makes me sad to say, because I generally had a high impression of Gelman.
"A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." (Frank Lloyd Wright)
Maybe for the higher-ups, the vice presidents and the CPO. But ask a single (experienced) engineer and you will get a pretty clear picture of whether the PM is adding value or not.
I'm guessing that Tyler Cowen is on team crypto and the blog author is taking him to task w/r/t Cowen's past writing on FTX? I don't know the history. Cowen runs another blog called the Ethnic Dining Guide, "All food is ethnic food". It's considered to be a legit restaurant review blog, or so I thought until recently, when I went to a place where he praised the "goat tacos" as authentic and best. I asked the woman at the counter for "goat tacos" and she was perplexed, told me it's beef, there's never been any goat meat served there. The blog post was dated May 2022, here's the wiki entry for the dish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birria
"traditionally made from goat meat, but occasionally made from beef, lamb, mutton or chicken"
I don't know how he got it so wrong, if he takes his food review seriously, did he eat there at all, did he know what he was eating, or just read the first line of the wiki. So the proxy for being unreliable is leaning against him.
Back to the subject at hand, my spouse works in the space industry. He tells me there's considerably less bullshit in his work compared to my own because you can't really fake your way into fooling people you know how to build a component of a satellite, or rockets. There seems to be a lot of charlatan in dev and IT. There's not a 'Learn launch vehicles in 60 days' type of books, courses vs what's available for devs.
The guy who wears boring, practical, comfortable shoes is probably the guy who actually knows how to do things.
Need to buy more time and you have cash on hand, run the FTX effective altruism playbook and throw some cash at charities and media.
I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency, it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield")
Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups.
Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible
Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde models", but not crypto itself.
It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is math, code, and gigawatts
I did like "it’s easy to promise things, especially if you have a good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can’t deliver."
Tell it to Freeman Dyson. In philosophy you could tell it to Derek Parfit. There are quite literally tens of thousands of people with higher degrees than them in their fields who achieved nothing comparable.
If an entry level employee is terrible, it will be obvious in a matter of days. It takes years for bad hires at the VP level and above to be recognized.
Journalism and media is a pretty good one there too, though obviously more with the tabloid/internet blogging side than with the more respected outlets. Very easy to fake stories and sources, and if cases like Stephen Glass are to be believed, you can get away with it for years even then.
BS is not in the picture as long as you are alone, not interacting with anybody and betting on a far away outcome which you cannot influence.
Say sports betting
As soon as one of the above ceases to be true, then BS enters the picture if you allow it too.
You might be bad but not malicious (Jim Cramer), you might be bad and malicious (Logan Paul), you might be some other thing where you're making highly contestable claims but it doesn't matter because investors throw their money at you (Elon Musk), you might even be in that same industry and a plain old fraud who got caught (Nikola, Trevor Milton).
As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.
sometimes people cover for a bad surgeon for financial/political reasons, but there's no fooling the anesthesiologist
He forgot about aids such as steroids.
But that just shows that the argument doesn't work with this definition, and the onus is still on the OP of providing a definition that works for his argument (or we have to conclude that his argument doesn't work).
Things can get very difficult very quick if a company has most of their knowledge stored in people's heads, and the main mode of spreading knowledge is meetings.
Having little documentation is common Having a high meeting culture makes this work for a part of the company, for a while. But even the good listeners at some point aren't sure enough about their knowledge that they would write about it. Making the problem worse.
AD(H)Ders will not be able to process any of this knowledge, because it's all dependent on listening to people. At some point they'll feel ashamed that they are in the project for years now and can't contribute properly.
If you do want to stay in this company, this strategy can work to make your life better:
1) Document everything, for yourself. Since you're ashamed of your lack of knowledge write up in private what you do know, or think you know. Since you keep it private nobody will see if you have something wrong.
2) When you need to something, you can test if this knowledge actually works as you wrote it up, you can refine it.
3) Once refined you can contribute it back to the main knowledge base.
4) If you don't know something, and can't find where it's documented, ask people to show you where it's documented. If it's not it's not a bad thing for a senior engineer to ask where it is documented. This saves face, and improves documentation.
Also: always ask people to write you emails if they want anything from you. Verbal is worthless.
Paraphrasing something one person told me(not the 3h guy, someone else):
"Look, I'm building a house right now and that's my main focus. I'm billed by the hour so if anyone finds out something is wrong with my work and orders me to fix it, then that's just more billable hours for me. I don't complain - at least there's work."
That last bit is specific to my corner of the world where the previous decades were marked by high unemployment.
One thing I’m going to try is putting everything into some kind of planner. Like my own personal scrum board. I know your case is a bit different but curious if you’ve found some tips and tricks that helped
Ok, bro
Another situation: we were estimating tasks and I challenged the estimate for a task he was supposed to do.
His reply: "ok, if I'm going to reduce my estimate then you reduce one of yours"
Normally I wouldn't care about such things, but my work depended on his and it was hard to make him follow through on his promises.
only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. Perhaps you make a good faith effort to get 6 to 8 but you can't seem to do it, or you're too exhausted after 3 or 4, but you can't simply demand that you should get paid for 8 but you're only going to work for 3 or 4 because that's enough.
6 to 8 hours of deep work is certainly possible but is it sustainable? I don't think so, minds need some slack time, enter a different mode of thinking, etc. For this reason work is chunked into workable amounts which it makes it sustainable as well.
The thing is, the syntax/design patterns in the code can look clean. But that doesnt mean the abstraction/interface is the right one
I recall how when Git started getting widespread adoption, a popular blogpost theme was discussion of cleaning up your commits...which is the kind of thing you can do if you're writing in small increments. But code that "moves mountains" in the architecture, as is often the case in a greenfield project where there's a lot of learning being done, tends to have dirty rip-off-the-bandage moments. If you clean up those kinds of commits, it's not really beneficial to future code archeology. But if you're clocking minimal effort and maximum CYA, it suddenly becomes hugely important to dot the i's and cross the t's, because that looks more professional than a commit log where you iterate on it a bunch and your log is like "maybe it's fixed now?"
It's better compared to many other measures you might think of, though it's an interesting exercise to consider what might work better.
it's not a pseudo metric.
(source: I did some work for a litigation support/consulting firm, expert witnesses for defense contracting)
We might be talking past each other here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but how does the example you presented address the argument that "lines of code produced are not a useful metric for evaluating individual developer performance at hiring time"?
So I added an hour's pair programming on either toy problems or our existing codebase, depending what was suitable at the time. No leetcode, no months of prep for candidates, and our interview outcomes were much better.
There's a massive gulf between toxic leetcode hoop-jumping and a friendly chat.
I 100% agree with you but it's not as easy and scaleable as it seems.
Interviewer training can help avoid that happening accidentally.
(And Leetcode interviews don't avoid the interviewer ego problem. It's purportedly "objective", but the interviewer can easily taint it, accidentally or intentionally. The answer isn't Leetcode, but to train or reign in egos, and then you can use a real conversation.)
The reason why I was asking is that it sounds to me that we're talking about two different roles entirely.
Yours is indeed quite valuable, but would be often called "project manager", whereas the one I'm talking about is more the customer-facing stakeholder-convincing business-outcome-responsible "product manager". See the difference explained here: https://www.coursera.org/articles/product-manager-vs-project...
Is that a fair assertion?