12 ms·

Presumption of stupidity

510 points by garry 11y ago

swanson 11y ago
The same presumption happens for people, too. Developers tend to assume that the people that wrote the terribly messy code that you inherited were incompetent. I think a much more productive and healthy attitude is to assume that everyone was doing the best they could, given their resources, knowledge, and deadlines at the time. That might be a false assumption (look, some people just don't care) but you gain very little by complaining and getting mad at things that already happened. We love to complain about things our predecessors did wrong, but often, we don't do those things either :)
- networked 11y ago
  I believe that the error the article describes comes from the family of "inside view" errors (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting). Taking an outside view instead is a very widely applicable principle.
- hn_in_cl2 11y ago
  There's also the fact that decisions can be very hard to un-make (even in something as malleable as code). This can lead to a bunch of slightly bad/messy decisions all coming together into something that is unimaginably messy/obtuse.
- huhtenberg 11y ago
  > Developers tend to assume that the people that wrote the terribly messy code that you inherited were incompetent. Don't over-generalize. There is a messy code and there is a messy code. Changing shared data without synchronization is incompetence, but having a 3-page long for-loop is not. In reality though, once you've cleaned stables a dozen times spaghetti code is the red flag of incompetence and the correlation is there.
  - zzalpha 11y ago
    > once you've cleaned stables a dozen times spaghetti code is the red flag of incompetence and the correlation is there. Question is, where's the incompetence? Yup, like any profession, there are developers out there who just suck. But the same is true of middle and senior company management. Can you honestly say you've never cut a corner because some incompetent manager mismanaged the schedule or customer expectations and then forced you to compromise quality in order to meet an absurd date? And in any organization with that type of management, those issues are rarely isolated. Any one manager can do a little damage, but when an organization is dysfunctional, well-meaning coders on the ground may be forced to compromise code quality time and time again in order to deal with unrealistic schedules. Think of it like a professional sports team. Sometimes, yeah, the players just suck. But a bad coach or general manager can have an outsized effect on an organization. Now, I would never claim that all bad code is a product of bad management. Again, some folks just suck at their job. But speaking as a guy in middle management, I'd be willing to believe at least half of the bad code lying around in the real world is a product of an incompetent management structure. Getting back to the article, that would represent the kind of hidden incentive that would cause an outsider to assume developer incompetence, even though the reality is very much different.
  - swanson 11y ago
    I absolutely agree that there exists terrible code and that there are incompetent individuals or folks that simply don't care. But if one assumes that as the default response, I don't think that is very helpful. Even in your example of shared data/synchronization - what if the original developers were told that the code would never need to be thread-safe? Or what if there was a constraint that required this trade-off to be made? It's not so black and white.
    - evilduck 11y ago
      Hell, even incompetent looking code (like managing shared resources poorly) can often be explained by a small script done by an amateur turning into a side business and then a full fledged company. Experience and knowledge of an industry beyond software is often many times more valuable than the knowledge of parallel programming. It doesn't mean the code wasn't valuable or good enough at the time, it just no longer meets the rigor and demands, that's why you're employed to work on it. To call everything shitty thats's below your own standards, level of education and experience is a naive view of how software actually exists in the world. Especially when the standard advice given to "idea people" is to learn to code their idea themselves.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Agreed. One example I see all the time is my more liberal/left-leaning friends assuming that their conservative adversaries (especially on the internet) are motivated solely by stupidity. This trips them up when they are confronted with evidence of intelligence and solid reasoning from the people they had presumed to be capable of neither. The reverse also happens of course, with the conservative person characterising their adversary as the stereotypical "Dumb Hippy".
  - lotharbot 11y ago
    Also happens with religion.
    - nugga 11y ago
      There is no similarity between that and religion. Religion by definition is an unjustified belief in supernatural - faith. There is no reason or logical backing for it. It is a malfunction of your reasoning system - perhaps heavy cognitive dissonance.
      - sbov 11y ago
        Sounds like love. Or friendship.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - lotharbot 11y ago
        GP said: "assuming that [others] are motivated solely by stupidity." You said: "by definition is an unjustified belief ... no reason or logical backing ... malfunction of your reasoning system" exactly proving the point. You've made a blanket statement regarding anyone who has come to a different conclusion from you regarding the supernatural. It must be stupidity! It can't possibly be justified, or even clear the bar of not-totally-irrational! There's no room to even try to have a conversation, because "by definition" people on the other side are stupid.
- pc86 11y ago
  Some of the worst code I've had to work with in my nearly 10-year long career so far was written by one of the smartest programmer's I've met. His problem was that everything because an exercise in designing this all-encompassing abstracted-to-hell-and-back web of interfaces, services, aggregates, domains, etc etc. Indicative of this was a request to take a table of data that already existed (on a website) and add a button to export a CSV of that data. For anyone familiar with .NET (and I assume most other languages) if you've already got the data in the format you want to export this is literally a 10-minute task, including a unit test or two for the functionality. His quote was something on order of 18 hours which included time to write a set of TableDataExportService methods that would support a whole host of file formats in the future.
  - tomjen3 11y ago
    YAGNI. Software should be implemented as simple as possible, and then refactored as necessary when new functionality is required (the only exception is things you are very sure is going to be needed, e.g a password reset functionality on a password dialog). Anyhow that is my development philosophy.
    - pc86 11y ago
      Yeah this was some of the most anti-YAGNI stuff I've seen. Which is not meant to detract from the fact that the code was great 99% of the time. It just took 10x longer than it should have and cost 10x as much and half of it was never used.
  - hinkley 11y ago
    I started on a project filled entirely with 'senior people' once, and was really pumped about the prospect of doing Serious Programming with serious people, instead of doing a bunch of mickey mouse crap. Six months later everything was going horribly wrong because there was not a single one of us who was willing to solve a simple problem with simple code. Everybody was engineering the hell out of every single 'solution' and the code was impossible to read. From this I learned a couple of things. One was that I had not learned as much from my Second System Syndrome as I thought I had. The second was that every project benefits from having people who are entertained by solving 'mundane' problems, to whom you can assign all concerns that are not part of the information architecture. But the most important is that the best solution is -never- the one that is dazzlingly brilliant. It's often the one that's subtly clever (everyone agrees "that works", but some can wax poetic about how great it is at satisfying the concern), but sometimes it's the one that's dead simple. Few solutions are easier to replace than the dead simple one.
- angersock 11y ago
  The issue is that, even allowing for good intentions, the fact tends to remain that the code is messy, undertested, and underspecified. I've worked on a legacy codebase where the developer both admitted that the code was a hack job, got guilty-defensive about it, and then refused to schedule any time to help make progress. You just want to shake them by the shoulders and be like "Look, it's fine that you did the best you could, but you need to either help clean up the mess or get out of the way." Chesterton's Fence is wise in moderation--otherwise, it ends up as technological hoarding.
  - swanson 11y ago
    Sure - at the end of the day even the best intentions can result in a poor quality output. I've just found that my own personal outlook is much better if I stop complaining about how some other person messed up and focused on where the code is currently and how we can solve the problems at hand given our new knowledge/resources/constraints.
    - angersock 11y ago
      Oh, on that I agree. I'm just very frustrated with, having taken those steps, being blocked because ~reasons~.
- ombudsperson 11y ago
  you make a very valid point!, Thx, :-)
artumi-richard 11y ago
I think you can generalise one more step up. Markets that look horribly inefficient may well not be.
- codyguy 11y ago
  Or maybe they are ;) How to find out? For some people, the only way to confirm is to try and be tested.
suhail 11y ago
Great advice. I do think that you should try to think about how you might try to solve something before looking at what your competitors do. The reason being that it's easy to trap our minds into thinking that there are no other solutions unless they fit into a similar box of what's already working. Naïveté combined with thinking for yourself can often be a powerful reason why many startups succeed. If your solution ends up looking similar, at least, it was likely derived from first principals vs the path of least resistance: blind copying.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
logicallee 11y ago
I couldn't disagree more. When Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion from Yahoo[1] when he was 22, and FB was two years old at the time, because they were "stupid and didn't get it, so they obviously were't valuing the company" properly he was right. The direct quote is: >Thiel described the argument Zuckerberg finally came down on like this: "[Yahoo] had no definitive idea about the future. They did not properly value things that did not yet exist so they were therefore undervaluing the business." Yahoo's market capitalization in July 2006 was $42.51 billion. A 22 year-old presumed they were stupid, and he was right. [2] Today FB has a market cap of $264.91B and Yahoo? Down to $35 billion after 9 years of growth. -- [1] http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-... [2] by the way to get the market valuation at the time, I did this search: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+capitalization+in+july+2006 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+mark... I can't believe it worked! I used wolframalpha because this is the kind of search they promise they can answer - and they were right, they actually delivered. Nobody else on the face of the planet does this, and it shouldn't even be possible. But it is. If you think something is possible, JUST DO IT. If you think your competitors are stupid (compared to what you think you can do), you're probably right. (or you wouldn't have that thought.)
- ikeboy 11y ago
  FWIW, https://www.google.com/search?q=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+capitalization+in+july+2006 https://www.google.com/search?q=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+ca... has an answer in the third link.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    yes, but what's amazing is that it's obvious how to calculate it. You look at a chart, mouse over the price at the time, figure out the number of shares at the time (mostly affected by any splits or new shares) and multiply. Instead of actually calculating it, though, I asked a robot to, using human language. Finding someone who happened to ask the exact same question by doing an Internet search is a different problem entirely. Wolfram Alpha can instantly answer questions that require certain levels of deduction or calculation, and which have never been asked in the history of the world. Google can do that too: for mathematical equations like 453442433 * 234523432 + 3485478347434879. Applying this to questions of a general type that require real-world data is miraculous.
minikites 11y ago
Chesterton's Fence: > In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
- carsongross 11y ago
  OT: I love the crypt-conservative community here on HN.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- danr4 11y ago
  Thanks for this.
- HCIdivision17 11y ago
  This philosophy is one of the cornerstones of my engineering practice. IFF you can describe why something is there - without using shortcuts/crutches like 'their dumb' - then we may be able to consider changing it. Otherwise, it's dangerous and risky to fool with it. Too many times did I see something absurd and paint myself into a corner trying to 'fix' it, when there really was a bizarre edge case that this covered. (And in plants, you usually only find these edge cases after enormously expensive production loss events!) And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical equivalent of the Principle of Charity. ( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html )
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
jasode 11y ago
When I read the essay, I thought of P Thiel's question of self-reflection that analyzes in the reverse direction: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"[1] I interpret "truth" to really be a highly-opinionated belief rather than something like "2+2=4". In other words, what factors do you believe in that would make the business model successful that outsiders would dismiss as insane or stupid? (On trivia related note: I notice the blog as the title of "stupitidy" instead of "stupidity" so I'm not sure if there's an inside joke I missed.) [1]http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-the-future/ http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-...
mnw21cam 11y ago
Love the (deliberate? ironic?) mis-spelling of stupidity in the title/url.
- bsdpython 11y ago
  The title is correct but the URL is misspelled. I assume they fixed the title after publishing so in that case the URL won't change. Clearly a typo in the original.
- akharris 11y ago
  Wish I could claim to have been either deliberate or ironic...but I actually got careless. Thanks for pointing it out!
dceddia 11y ago
This is a great thing to consider, and I think this presumption of stupidity bleeds over into other areas of life too. Developers: inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. Surely the old developer had no idea what they were doing. The "other faction": Democrats/Republicans, different religions, rich vs. poor people... most generalizations about the faction you don't belong to start off with thinking "they're so stupid". "Look at those Republicans/Democrats. Can't they see that Trump/Obama is just lying through his teeth?" Bad actors: The presumption of stupidity carries over into the way people think about computer hackers and terrorists and the like. You'll see stories about how "those terrorists are learning how to use cell phones to detonate bombs!" or how "criminals are migrating online to prey on people with phishing attacks!" The underlying assumption is that they're stupid, but getting (dangerously) smarter. I think we'd make a lot more headway in most areas by assuming our competitors, detractors, and wrong-doers are probably already pretty smart.
- pacala 11y ago
  > Inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. I'm facing this dilemma right now, and I find it a whole lot more nuanced. The previous dev definitely had the right ideas, but he also produced XXXXX lines of code. I would take me years to wrap my head around the reasons for all these lines. Is this a bug or a feature? It would take me weeks to rewrite it, drop 75% of the corner cases for which I have no test case / clue why they have been coded. Then become the grumpy old dev that says "no" to 95% of feature requests and keep things simple. At the risk of my job.
  - swanson 11y ago
    You might find value in exploring the idea of Characterization Tests or Software Seams.
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      or Working Effectively with Legacy Software.
brandonb 11y ago
To generalize: competitors in a market usually behave rationally, and what looks like "stupid" behavior from afar may actually be unseen incentives. Which suggests a test for your understanding of a market: can you map out the incentives and explain why what looks like apparently-irrational behavior is happening? For example, in healthcare, we waste 30%+ of the $3T we spend each year. Much of that waste is due to hospital readmissions for an ongoing condition like heart failure. Startups sometimes try to fix this by developing a special machine learning algorithm to predict readmissions and apply an intervention. But even when the technology succeeds, the business fails: hospitals charge for readmissions, so there's an active disincentive for the hospital to buy the product. (That is now changing with ACOs, and a change in incentives is an opportunity for new companies.)
- StavrosK 11y ago
  I don't understand your comment. You say "we waste 30%", but then say "hospitals charge". Who's the "we" who's wasting 30%, and why are startups trying to sell something to prevent X to the people who make money from X, rather than to the people who lose money from X?
  - brandonb 11y ago
    "We" referred to US healthcare spending [1], and the party with the right incentive for this problem is the payers: Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance like Aetna, Blue Shield, United Healthcare, etc. While the payers have the incentive to reduce readmissions (saves them money, leading to lower insurance premiums for you), they don't usually have the access to do so -- they're not the one seeing the patient or prescribing medicine. The payers could, of course, try to change the way that THEY reimburse the hospital to align the incentives. For Medicare and Medicaid, that requires a law--which is why the Affordable Care Act is creating opportunities for new startups as it rolls out. For private insurance, I think they'd like to change reimbursement, but they have relatively little market power compared to healthcare providers: http://rockhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-al-Overcoming-the-Pricing-Power-of-Hospitals.pdf http://rockhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-a... [1] Completely different set of incentives (and thus problems) in other healthcare systems.
QuantumRoar 11y ago
Really? Is that the way some people reason about their competitors? Something like: "Oh, I guess they're just stupid and we're so smart." Who in their right mind would do such a thing. Even if the competitors really are stupid (who knows?), it doesn't give you any advantage to assume that.
- lewisjoe 11y ago
  No, it isn't that way. It mostly ends up as a consequence of initially over-estimating the competitor. So your mind looks for their tiniest shortcomings to make sure that they do things wrong too. Once it finds such a thing, subconsciously the mind registers the competitor as weaker than they actually are, to redeem your mind from the uncomfortable prick of a all-powerful competitor. It doesn't happen for everyone though. It takes a bit of rationality to overcome such conclusions. I personally know people who'd read and stress negative reviews of their competitors' products, and eventually conclude that their competitors are not really thoughtful in their decision making. TL;DR - Yes.
- rwallace 11y ago
  Ah, metaness! So can we assume people who assume other people are stupid, are stupid? Or is there some benefit from doing things that way that might not be apparent at first sight? One possibility that comes to mind is the substitution of parallelism for serial processing, or put another way, letting the world be its own model. Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right and succeed.
  - QuantumRoar 11y ago
    > Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right and succeed. But that'd be something like evolution or anthropic computing. In order to find a solution to a hard problem, write down something. If it is not a solution, kill yourself. Conditioned on looking at anything at all, you look at the correct solution. Or we could use the distinct advantage of humans and think about it properly.
thenomad 11y ago
An important line in the piece: "Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart." I'd rephrase as follows: it's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your competition, but it's very wise to allow the possibility of stupidity. With the corollary that if there's an inexpensive way to capitalise on that stupidity if it exists, it's probably worth trying, just in case the thing that's walking like a duck and quacking like a duck is in fact a duck. As a tangent to that - the chances that assumptions of stupidity are correct go up in direct proportion to your level of domain knowledge. I see a lot of non-film people say "the movie industry does $FOO and that's really stupid", for example, and 95% of the time, they're wrong and there are good reasons for doing $FOO. However, I also see people who know the film world (including me) say "a lot of / most filmmakers do $BAR and it's dumb" - and $BAR has a considerably higher chance of actually being a dumb, common mistake.
- mcphage 11y ago
  A little more succinct might be: "It's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your competition, but don't rule out stupidity."
danielweber 11y ago
I've experienced this myself. Sometimes what our competitors were doing was stupid, and we ate their lunch. Sometimes what our competitors were doing was the only way to really run things, and we had to adapt to follow them.
PaulHoule 11y ago
One thing I learned the hard way is that if you are on the right track, your competitors are probably barking up the same tree and are further along than you would think baes on what is public. For instance there was a period of many years where both Google and Bing image search were embarrassingly bad and I was able to build something far better for a certain range of queries. It took me a year to build out my system but in that year, Bing and Google both improved dramatically, so my demo comparing results with them was no longer impressive at all.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Technology has some phase changes, where it suddenly changes from "doing X is extremely hard" to "hey, X is actually very easy to do!" without any ado, and no obvious reasons. There are too many histories where after a long time of nothing happening, everybody suddenly starts working on the same problem, without any kind of coordination.
codyguy 11y ago
I am confident of the value I deliver but I don't call my competitors stupid. One person being correct or a winner doesn't mean others are stupid. Maybe some people can deliver value where the competition doesn't. Could be due to some leverage or insight or creativity.
jacquesm 11y ago
I tend to err on the side of caution with stuff like this, for instance when inheriting a code-base I assume the previous author actually knew what he/she was doing. But sometimes (not often) that can work against you as well. For instance when after spending sufficient time with said codebase you realize the original writer was entirely out of their depth and this was likely the first time they'd attempted to write something this complex. But more often than not it is the presumption of intelligence that pays off.
jleader 11y ago
A lot of people seem to be unaware that companies survive by satisficing. That is, you don't have to do everything "right" to succeed in business. You just have to do most things well enough to not fail (don't break the law, don't forget to file your paperwork, pay your bills, etc.), and a few (one?) things outstandingly enough to win customers. We've been brought up in school to think we have to get nearly every answer right on the test in order to get a good grade (and get more than half of the answers right just to not flunk out). In the real world, getting one right answer, and not screwing the rest up too badly is often enough (and sometimes only barely achievable!). So maybe your competitor did something "stupid" because they're stupid, or maybe it's because that thing doesn't actually matter that much, and they're focused on doing something else incredibly well instead.
csense 11y ago
This sounds like an instance of the fundamental attribution error [1]. It's a known human cognitive bias to blame others' failings on internal characteristics while seeing your own situation as more of a product of external influences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
- griffinmahon 11y ago
  Also relevant is the reversed phrase, "Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by X (some other reasonable cause)."
k__ 11y ago
I had the experience, that things people identify as "stupid decisions" are often just "economical decisions" For example, a company I worked for had the best technology, but bad UI and the competitors had good UI, but their tech was old and inaccurate. For years we thought they were imbeciles, because they didn't update their tech and we would smash them in the future, because they cannot catch up with us. But in the end the customers bought the software with the better UI and didn't look behind the scenes. So their decision was logical. Why pour money and time in parts of the software when noone wants to pay for this.
jhonovich 11y ago
It is valuable to determine what technology, not available in the past, would cause a reasonable insider to change their decisions if they could implement that technology.
normloman 11y ago
Founders presume the stupidity of the competition because they're arrogant. Silicon valley, with it's notion of creative destruction and disrupting the establishment, encourages arrogance. We're blinded by the notion that new always trumps old, so we never consider that the established industry has reasons behind how it runs.
- Patrick_Devine 11y ago
  I agree, but I think this is what makes SV wonderful. You have to be somewhat naive to think your approach is going to be better than the status quo, particularly when your competition is well established, and probably well capitalized. The reason why big companies can't turn on a dime is that they have a lot of people who work for them, and an existing customer base. It's difficult to align all of those people on a new, and potentially better way of solving a problem. It's not that they are collectively "idiots", it's that they have an established business with an established track record. This is quintessentially the Innovators Dilemma. Technology markets almost always move downmarket to the cheaper solution which at first looks like a "toy".
  - normloman 11y ago
    Yes! I wish more people would actually read that book instead of throwing the word "disruption" around vaguely. After reading it, you'll realize the established business almost always has the advantage, and start ups only succeed in certain environments.
Bartweiss 11y ago
This is an excellent observation. When you encounter a suboptimal system, there's a substantial chance that it either produces some unnoticed benefit or results from some coordination problem that can't be overcome by "just not doing that". In either case, successful solutions have to work around the gap in the system rather than simply charging into it.
simonswords82 11y ago
Great article, taking the thinking further... Everybody watches their competitors, it's entirely natural. It's solid advice to study them, and try to stay/get ahead of them where possible. This doesn't just apply to app features, but every facet of the business across many disciplines (sales/marketing/development/back office etc). On the other hand, building a business based solely on a competitor's business decisions and not doing your own homework is the path to madness. We might take inspiration from our competitors, but we always check in with our customers next to make sure they actually want the feature. It's also our job to get feedback on not just what we're doing but also how we're planning to do it, as our users might have unique business requirements that our competitor's users do not.
riemannzeta 11y ago
Despite the flaws in the rational model of economics and the efficient market hypothesis more generally, I have always been fond of the more humble, observant posture it gives us in considering others' behavior. The flaws in the rational model are well-known. But as a presumption, it certainly works better than its opposite.
btbuildem 11y ago
Those folks are just being introspective, that's all..
jusben1369 11y ago
I think this is the classic problem of advice giving that's so prevalent in the startup community today. It won't be too long until we're all praising a tweet or article that talks about only those who brashly challenge the status quo and assume the entrenched players are vulnerable, bogged down with legacy issues and fat and lazy on an existing revenue stream are ripe for the disrupting. Those who sit back and say "Well maybe there's a reason they do things this way I'm not sure" aren't bold enough and won't be the recipients of the spoils of disruption. Not that this article is bad. It's just datapoint 107 that a founder has to reconcile with all the other competing advice.
- amsilprotag 11y ago
  Many times throughout the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast[1], a founder expresses the sentiment, "If I had known how hard it was going to be, I might not have started the company." The difficulty discounting has also been cited as the reason why many successful founders are young and inexperienced. So while hubris can lead to disastrous consequences for engineers, it could be viewed as an asset for inciting action. [1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html
brianmcconnell 11y ago
The important thing in analyzing a competitor's behavior is to understand the incentives motivating that behavior. A common example in startupland is a company whose senior management has short term incentives that reward a fast exit over long term growth. That company may very well behave in ways that appear dumb to competitors with a long term focus. But if the "seasoned" CEO and his cronies get their compensation even in a mediocre deal, why bother trying to build a company for the ages when they can cash out, rest a bit and land in a similar situation at the next gig?
joseraul 11y ago
People may have a sense of superiority, especially smart ones. Chess world champion (and genius) Bobby Fischer once said: "My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don't take these things into consideration".
noobplusplus 11y ago
A nice article to manipulate your competitors from doing a market survey!
DrNuke 11y ago
Uh, I was thinking this article is more business-side than operational? Easily put: a business exists if it stays afloat and fences are often the way not to go under, even if they appear stupid from outside. Many times, fences are the only common ground between sellers and buyers. Removing fences is, a lot of times, pretty stupid = you geniuses operate at a loss and survive from artificial money or VCs until you are allowed to.
tomcam 11y ago
I have never disparaged my competitors, but I'm a small fry. I can say that during four years at Microsoft (1996-2000, Development Tools group) I never heard the products of competitors disparaged that way. In fact, there was a weekly presentation of competing products and invariably the interest was in where we were lacking, not what was bad about them. Likewise when customers came to visit us at trade shows my boss would sit politely through their compliments, then immediately jump to the question "So what don't you like about our product?" Fast forward to today. I'm friends with top people at a Really Big Guitar Company and a Huge Amplifier company. Even in private, these C-level execs show nothing but respect for products of their competitors. They are not ashamed to own and even personally use said products (especially vintage ones). It seems to me that dissing your competitors even privately can make you dangerously blind to the challenges they pose to you, set a bad example for your employees, and also restrict your job prospects should you decide to work for a competitor one day.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  Interesting - thank you for sharing this.
colordrops 11y ago
This mindset can be seen in other systems of thought. There are a large number of species known to man, yet we somehow think that we are the pinnacle of the tree of life, despite the fact that this is statistically highly unlikely when only taking into account pure numbers. Considering the dimensions now accessible to us that were completely unknown even 500 years ago, it doesn't seem a large leap at all to posit that there are other dimensions we are currentlt unaware of that contain life forms in the same tree as ours that are far more advanced and perhaps even invisible to us.
lpolovets 11y ago
This is so true. As a investor, I hear a lot of pitches where the founders say their competitive advantage is that they execute better (the flip side of believing everyone else is dumb is believing you're especially smart). Do you know who else claims they "execute better"? Everyone. That kind of attitude usually reveals that a founder doesn't have a real sense of what makes their company special and defensible, and is a bit of a yellow flag for investors -- well, at least for me.
donarb 11y ago
Once again, xkcd explains all. https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/
ZoeZoeBee 11y ago
This works well when considering people in your own field, you know what it took for you to get there and you can assume they've had similar experiences. However when you are considering the general public it is best to presume stupidity and design with that in mind.
shurcooL 11y ago
Agree with the first 3 paragraphs so much, well put.
bro-stick 11y ago
Not much else to add. Presume a larger, smarter, better funded team is working stealthily in another office somewhere to kick our ass... anything else is complacency. Worse, following that path, leads to hubris at some juncture: excuses rationalizing cutting the wrong corners or shortchanging the customer that could prove fatal in a game of inches in the marketplace. There are at least a quadrillion ways to fail, and 99.997% of them will be my doing. Rational paranoia is healthy, because your product/service needs to be so well-regarded by people other than the team or supporters that it demoralizes potential adversaries that they don't want to compete. Even then, it still may not be currently as good in other key areas of focus as a competitors. (Btw, the Thiel view of not picking fights you can't dominate and Buffett's sticking to defensible business models is a good mindset to calibrate a venture's success per risk gut perception. And with timing, team and execution you might just make something that hits.)
andyidsinga 11y ago
see also: Sarah Silverman's bit on scientology and things that sound weird.
nitwit005 11y ago
This is probably not a correctable problem. People don't start businesses if they think the competition is highly competitive and intelligent. They start a business of they perceive a weakness in the market, or believe they have a unique capacity to succeed.
tr352 11y ago
Working in academia, I've experienced this too. I've read work in my field of research that I dismissed as bad work or not worthwhile, simply because I didn't fully understand them. Too complicated, strange background assumptions, not well motivated, etcetera. Then later, while developing my own work, I find that I end up with the same complications, that I'm forced to make the same background assumptions, and I have the same difficulty in motivating my choices.

510 points by garry 11y ago

The same presumption happens for people, too. Developers tend to assume that the people that wrote the terribly messy code that you inherited were incompetent. I think a much more productive and healthy attitude is to assume that everyone was doing the best they could, given their resources, knowledge, and deadlines at the time. That might be a false assumption (look, some people just don't care) but you gain very little by complaining and getting mad at things that already happened. We love to complain about things our predecessors did wrong, but often, we don't do those things either :)

networked 11y ago
I believe that the error the article describes comes from the family of "inside view" errors (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting). Taking an outside view instead is a very widely applicable principle.
hn_in_cl2 11y ago
There's also the fact that decisions can be very hard to un-make (even in something as malleable as code). This can lead to a bunch of slightly bad/messy decisions all coming together into something that is unimaginably messy/obtuse.
huhtenberg 11y ago
> Developers tend to assume that the people that wrote the terribly messy code that you inherited were incompetent. Don't over-generalize. There is a messy code and there is a messy code. Changing shared data without synchronization is incompetence, but having a 3-page long for-loop is not. In reality though, once you've cleaned stables a dozen times spaghetti code is the red flag of incompetence and the correlation is there.
- zzalpha 11y ago
  > once you've cleaned stables a dozen times spaghetti code is the red flag of incompetence and the correlation is there. Question is, where's the incompetence? Yup, like any profession, there are developers out there who just suck. But the same is true of middle and senior company management. Can you honestly say you've never cut a corner because some incompetent manager mismanaged the schedule or customer expectations and then forced you to compromise quality in order to meet an absurd date? And in any organization with that type of management, those issues are rarely isolated. Any one manager can do a little damage, but when an organization is dysfunctional, well-meaning coders on the ground may be forced to compromise code quality time and time again in order to deal with unrealistic schedules. Think of it like a professional sports team. Sometimes, yeah, the players just suck. But a bad coach or general manager can have an outsized effect on an organization. Now, I would never claim that all bad code is a product of bad management. Again, some folks just suck at their job. But speaking as a guy in middle management, I'd be willing to believe at least half of the bad code lying around in the real world is a product of an incompetent management structure. Getting back to the article, that would represent the kind of hidden incentive that would cause an outsider to assume developer incompetence, even though the reality is very much different.
- swanson 11y ago
  I absolutely agree that there exists terrible code and that there are incompetent individuals or folks that simply don't care. But if one assumes that as the default response, I don't think that is very helpful. Even in your example of shared data/synchronization - what if the original developers were told that the code would never need to be thread-safe? Or what if there was a constraint that required this trade-off to be made? It's not so black and white.
  - evilduck 11y ago
    Hell, even incompetent looking code (like managing shared resources poorly) can often be explained by a small script done by an amateur turning into a side business and then a full fledged company. Experience and knowledge of an industry beyond software is often many times more valuable than the knowledge of parallel programming. It doesn't mean the code wasn't valuable or good enough at the time, it just no longer meets the rigor and demands, that's why you're employed to work on it. To call everything shitty thats's below your own standards, level of education and experience is a naive view of how software actually exists in the world. Especially when the standard advice given to "idea people" is to learn to code their idea themselves.
s_kilk 11y ago
Agreed. One example I see all the time is my more liberal/left-leaning friends assuming that their conservative adversaries (especially on the internet) are motivated solely by stupidity. This trips them up when they are confronted with evidence of intelligence and solid reasoning from the people they had presumed to be capable of neither. The reverse also happens of course, with the conservative person characterising their adversary as the stereotypical "Dumb Hippy".
- lotharbot 11y ago
  Also happens with religion.
  - nugga 11y ago
    There is no similarity between that and religion. Religion by definition is an unjustified belief in supernatural - faith. There is no reason or logical backing for it. It is a malfunction of your reasoning system - perhaps heavy cognitive dissonance.
    - sbov 11y ago
      Sounds like love. Or friendship.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - lotharbot 11y ago
      GP said: "assuming that [others] are motivated solely by stupidity." You said: "by definition is an unjustified belief ... no reason or logical backing ... malfunction of your reasoning system" exactly proving the point. You've made a blanket statement regarding anyone who has come to a different conclusion from you regarding the supernatural. It must be stupidity! It can't possibly be justified, or even clear the bar of not-totally-irrational! There's no room to even try to have a conversation, because "by definition" people on the other side are stupid.
pc86 11y ago
Some of the worst code I've had to work with in my nearly 10-year long career so far was written by one of the smartest programmer's I've met. His problem was that everything because an exercise in designing this all-encompassing abstracted-to-hell-and-back web of interfaces, services, aggregates, domains, etc etc. Indicative of this was a request to take a table of data that already existed (on a website) and add a button to export a CSV of that data. For anyone familiar with .NET (and I assume most other languages) if you've already got the data in the format you want to export this is literally a 10-minute task, including a unit test or two for the functionality. His quote was something on order of 18 hours which included time to write a set of TableDataExportService methods that would support a whole host of file formats in the future.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  YAGNI. Software should be implemented as simple as possible, and then refactored as necessary when new functionality is required (the only exception is things you are very sure is going to be needed, e.g a password reset functionality on a password dialog). Anyhow that is my development philosophy.
  - pc86 11y ago
    Yeah this was some of the most anti-YAGNI stuff I've seen. Which is not meant to detract from the fact that the code was great 99% of the time. It just took 10x longer than it should have and cost 10x as much and half of it was never used.
- hinkley 11y ago
  I started on a project filled entirely with 'senior people' once, and was really pumped about the prospect of doing Serious Programming with serious people, instead of doing a bunch of mickey mouse crap. Six months later everything was going horribly wrong because there was not a single one of us who was willing to solve a simple problem with simple code. Everybody was engineering the hell out of every single 'solution' and the code was impossible to read. From this I learned a couple of things. One was that I had not learned as much from my Second System Syndrome as I thought I had. The second was that every project benefits from having people who are entertained by solving 'mundane' problems, to whom you can assign all concerns that are not part of the information architecture. But the most important is that the best solution is -never- the one that is dazzlingly brilliant. It's often the one that's subtly clever (everyone agrees "that works", but some can wax poetic about how great it is at satisfying the concern), but sometimes it's the one that's dead simple. Few solutions are easier to replace than the dead simple one.
angersock 11y ago
The issue is that, even allowing for good intentions, the fact tends to remain that the code is messy, undertested, and underspecified. I've worked on a legacy codebase where the developer both admitted that the code was a hack job, got guilty-defensive about it, and then refused to schedule any time to help make progress. You just want to shake them by the shoulders and be like "Look, it's fine that you did the best you could, but you need to either help clean up the mess or get out of the way." Chesterton's Fence is wise in moderation--otherwise, it ends up as technological hoarding.
- swanson 11y ago
  Sure - at the end of the day even the best intentions can result in a poor quality output. I've just found that my own personal outlook is much better if I stop complaining about how some other person messed up and focused on where the code is currently and how we can solve the problems at hand given our new knowledge/resources/constraints.
  - angersock 11y ago
    Oh, on that I agree. I'm just very frustrated with, having taken those steps, being blocked because ~reasons~.
ombudsperson 11y ago
you make a very valid point!, Thx, :-)

artumi-richard 11y ago

I think you can generalise one more step up. Markets that look horribly inefficient may well not be.

codyguy 11y ago
Or maybe they are ;) How to find out? For some people, the only way to confirm is to try and be tested.

suhail 11y ago

Great advice. I do think that you should try to think about how you might try to solve something before looking at what your competitors do. The reason being that it's easy to trap our minds into thinking that there are no other solutions unless they fit into a similar box of what's already working. Naïveté combined with thinking for yourself can often be a powerful reason why many startups succeed. If your solution ends up looking similar, at least, it was likely derived from first principals vs the path of least resistance: blind copying.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

logicallee 11y ago

I couldn't disagree more. When Mark Zuckerberg turned down $1 billion from Yahoo[1] when he was 22, and FB was two years old at the time, because they were "stupid and didn't get it, so they obviously were't valuing the company" properly he was right. The direct quote is: >Thiel described the argument Zuckerberg finally came down on like this: "[Yahoo] had no definitive idea about the future. They did not properly value things that did not yet exist so they were therefore undervaluing the business." Yahoo's market capitalization in July 2006 was $42.51 billion. A 22 year-old presumed they were stupid, and he was right. [2] Today FB has a market cap of $264.91B and Yahoo? Down to $35 billion after 9 years of growth. -- [1] http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-... [2] by the way to get the market valuation at the time, I did this search: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+capitalization+in+july+2006 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+was+yahoo%27s+mark... I can't believe it worked! I used wolframalpha because this is the kind of search they promise they can answer - and they were right, they actually delivered. Nobody else on the face of the planet does this, and it shouldn't even be possible. But it is. If you think something is possible, JUST DO IT. If you think your competitors are stupid (compared to what you think you can do), you're probably right. (or you wouldn't have that thought.)

ikeboy 11y ago
FWIW, https://www.google.com/search?q=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+capitalization+in+july+2006 https://www.google.com/search?q=what+was+yahoo%27s+market+ca... has an answer in the third link.
- logicallee 11y ago
  yes, but what's amazing is that it's obvious how to calculate it. You look at a chart, mouse over the price at the time, figure out the number of shares at the time (mostly affected by any splits or new shares) and multiply. Instead of actually calculating it, though, I asked a robot to, using human language. Finding someone who happened to ask the exact same question by doing an Internet search is a different problem entirely. Wolfram Alpha can instantly answer questions that require certain levels of deduction or calculation, and which have never been asked in the history of the world. Google can do that too: for mathematical equations like 453442433 * 234523432 + 3485478347434879. Applying this to questions of a general type that require real-world data is miraculous.

minikites 11y ago

Chesterton's Fence: > In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

carsongross 11y ago
OT: I love the crypt-conservative community here on HN.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
danr4 11y ago
Thanks for this.
HCIdivision17 11y ago
This philosophy is one of the cornerstones of my engineering practice. IFF you can describe why something is there - without using shortcuts/crutches like 'their dumb' - then we may be able to consider changing it. Otherwise, it's dangerous and risky to fool with it. Too many times did I see something absurd and paint myself into a corner trying to 'fix' it, when there really was a bizarre edge case that this covered. (And in plants, you usually only find these edge cases after enormously expensive production loss events!) And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical equivalent of the Principle of Charity. ( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html )
- JoshTriplett 11y ago

jasode 11y ago

When I read the essay, I thought of P Thiel's question of self-reflection that analyzes in the reverse direction: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"[1] I interpret "truth" to really be a highly-opinionated belief rather than something like "2+2=4". In other words, what factors do you believe in that would make the business model successful that outsiders would dismiss as insane or stupid? (On trivia related note: I notice the blog as the title of "stupitidy" instead of "stupidity" so I'm not sure if there's an inside joke I missed.) [1]http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-the-future/ http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/peter-thiels-the-challenge-of-...

mnw21cam 11y ago

Love the (deliberate? ironic?) mis-spelling of stupidity in the title/url.

bsdpython 11y ago
The title is correct but the URL is misspelled. I assume they fixed the title after publishing so in that case the URL won't change. Clearly a typo in the original.
akharris 11y ago
Wish I could claim to have been either deliberate or ironic...but I actually got careless. Thanks for pointing it out!

dceddia 11y ago

This is a great thing to consider, and I think this presumption of stupidity bleeds over into other areas of life too. Developers: inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. Surely the old developer had no idea what they were doing. The "other faction": Democrats/Republicans, different religions, rich vs. poor people... most generalizations about the faction you don't belong to start off with thinking "they're so stupid". "Look at those Republicans/Democrats. Can't they see that Trump/Obama is just lying through his teeth?" Bad actors: The presumption of stupidity carries over into the way people think about computer hackers and terrorists and the like. You'll see stories about how "those terrorists are learning how to use cell phones to detonate bombs!" or how "criminals are migrating online to prey on people with phishing attacks!" The underlying assumption is that they're stupid, but getting (dangerously) smarter. I think we'd make a lot more headway in most areas by assuming our competitors, detractors, and wrong-doers are probably already pretty smart.

pacala 11y ago
> Inherited code is considered guilty until proven innocent. Or maybe more accurately, guilty until you've rewritten it. I'm facing this dilemma right now, and I find it a whole lot more nuanced. The previous dev definitely had the right ideas, but he also produced XXXXX lines of code. I would take me years to wrap my head around the reasons for all these lines. Is this a bug or a feature? It would take me weeks to rewrite it, drop 75% of the corner cases for which I have no test case / clue why they have been coded. Then become the grumpy old dev that says "no" to 95% of feature requests and keep things simple. At the risk of my job.
- swanson 11y ago
  You might find value in exploring the idea of Characterization Tests or Software Seams.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    or Working Effectively with Legacy Software.

brandonb 11y ago

To generalize: competitors in a market usually behave rationally, and what looks like "stupid" behavior from afar may actually be unseen incentives. Which suggests a test for your understanding of a market: can you map out the incentives and explain why what looks like apparently-irrational behavior is happening? For example, in healthcare, we waste 30%+ of the $3T we spend each year. Much of that waste is due to hospital readmissions for an ongoing condition like heart failure. Startups sometimes try to fix this by developing a special machine learning algorithm to predict readmissions and apply an intervention. But even when the technology succeeds, the business fails: hospitals charge for readmissions, so there's an active disincentive for the hospital to buy the product. (That is now changing with ACOs, and a change in incentives is an opportunity for new companies.)

StavrosK 11y ago
I don't understand your comment. You say "we waste 30%", but then say "hospitals charge". Who's the "we" who's wasting 30%, and why are startups trying to sell something to prevent X to the people who make money from X, rather than to the people who lose money from X?
- brandonb 11y ago
  "We" referred to US healthcare spending [1], and the party with the right incentive for this problem is the payers: Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance like Aetna, Blue Shield, United Healthcare, etc. While the payers have the incentive to reduce readmissions (saves them money, leading to lower insurance premiums for you), they don't usually have the access to do so -- they're not the one seeing the patient or prescribing medicine. The payers could, of course, try to change the way that THEY reimburse the hospital to align the incentives. For Medicare and Medicaid, that requires a law--which is why the Affordable Care Act is creating opportunities for new startups as it rolls out. For private insurance, I think they'd like to change reimbursement, but they have relatively little market power compared to healthcare providers: http://rockhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-al-Overcoming-the-Pricing-Power-of-Hospitals.pdf http://rockhealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Kocher-et-a... [1] Completely different set of incentives (and thus problems) in other healthcare systems.

QuantumRoar 11y ago

Really? Is that the way some people reason about their competitors? Something like: "Oh, I guess they're just stupid and we're so smart." Who in their right mind would do such a thing. Even if the competitors really are stupid (who knows?), it doesn't give you any advantage to assume that.

lewisjoe 11y ago
No, it isn't that way. It mostly ends up as a consequence of initially over-estimating the competitor. So your mind looks for their tiniest shortcomings to make sure that they do things wrong too. Once it finds such a thing, subconsciously the mind registers the competitor as weaker than they actually are, to redeem your mind from the uncomfortable prick of a all-powerful competitor. It doesn't happen for everyone though. It takes a bit of rationality to overcome such conclusions. I personally know people who'd read and stress negative reviews of their competitors' products, and eventually conclude that their competitors are not really thoughtful in their decision making. TL;DR - Yes.
rwallace 11y ago
Ah, metaness! So can we assume people who assume other people are stupid, are stupid? Or is there some benefit from doing things that way that might not be apparent at first sight? One possibility that comes to mind is the substitution of parallelism for serial processing, or put another way, letting the world be its own model. Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right and succeed.
- QuantumRoar 11y ago
  > Instead of one startup spending a lot of time thinking and researching (and maybe missing the market window if there was one), let ten startups just assume and go for it. Maybe nine will be wrong and fail and one will be right and succeed. But that'd be something like evolution or anthropic computing. In order to find a solution to a hard problem, write down something. If it is not a solution, kill yourself. Conditioned on looking at anything at all, you look at the correct solution. Or we could use the distinct advantage of humans and think about it properly.

thenomad 11y ago

An important line in the piece: "Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart." I'd rephrase as follows: it's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your competition, but it's very wise to allow the possibility of stupidity. With the corollary that if there's an inexpensive way to capitalise on that stupidity if it exists, it's probably worth trying, just in case the thing that's walking like a duck and quacking like a duck is in fact a duck. As a tangent to that - the chances that assumptions of stupidity are correct go up in direct proportion to your level of domain knowledge. I see a lot of non-film people say "the movie industry does $FOO and that's really stupid", for example, and 95% of the time, they're wrong and there are good reasons for doing $FOO. However, I also see people who know the film world (including me) say "a lot of / most filmmakers do $BAR and it's dumb" - and $BAR has a considerably higher chance of actually being a dumb, common mistake.

mcphage 11y ago
A little more succinct might be: "It's unwise to assume stupidity on the part of your competition, but don't rule out stupidity."

danielweber 11y ago

I've experienced this myself. Sometimes what our competitors were doing was stupid, and we ate their lunch. Sometimes what our competitors were doing was the only way to really run things, and we had to adapt to follow them.

PaulHoule 11y ago

One thing I learned the hard way is that if you are on the right track, your competitors are probably barking up the same tree and are further along than you would think baes on what is public. For instance there was a period of many years where both Google and Bing image search were embarrassingly bad and I was able to build something far better for a certain range of queries. It took me a year to build out my system but in that year, Bing and Google both improved dramatically, so my demo comparing results with them was no longer impressive at all.

marcosdumay 11y ago
Technology has some phase changes, where it suddenly changes from "doing X is extremely hard" to "hey, X is actually very easy to do!" without any ado, and no obvious reasons. There are too many histories where after a long time of nothing happening, everybody suddenly starts working on the same problem, without any kind of coordination.

codyguy 11y ago

I am confident of the value I deliver but I don't call my competitors stupid. One person being correct or a winner doesn't mean others are stupid. Maybe some people can deliver value where the competition doesn't. Could be due to some leverage or insight or creativity.

jacquesm 11y ago

I tend to err on the side of caution with stuff like this, for instance when inheriting a code-base I assume the previous author actually knew what he/she was doing. But sometimes (not often) that can work against you as well. For instance when after spending sufficient time with said codebase you realize the original writer was entirely out of their depth and this was likely the first time they'd attempted to write something this complex. But more often than not it is the presumption of intelligence that pays off.

jleader 11y ago

A lot of people seem to be unaware that companies survive by satisficing. That is, you don't have to do everything "right" to succeed in business. You just have to do most things well enough to not fail (don't break the law, don't forget to file your paperwork, pay your bills, etc.), and a few (one?) things outstandingly enough to win customers. We've been brought up in school to think we have to get nearly every answer right on the test in order to get a good grade (and get more than half of the answers right just to not flunk out). In the real world, getting one right answer, and not screwing the rest up too badly is often enough (and sometimes only barely achievable!). So maybe your competitor did something "stupid" because they're stupid, or maybe it's because that thing doesn't actually matter that much, and they're focused on doing something else incredibly well instead.

csense 11y ago

This sounds like an instance of the fundamental attribution error [1]. It's a known human cognitive bias to blame others' failings on internal characteristics while seeing your own situation as more of a product of external influences. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

griffinmahon 11y ago
Also relevant is the reversed phrase, "Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by X (some other reasonable cause)."

k__ 11y ago

I had the experience, that things people identify as "stupid decisions" are often just "economical decisions" For example, a company I worked for had the best technology, but bad UI and the competitors had good UI, but their tech was old and inaccurate. For years we thought they were imbeciles, because they didn't update their tech and we would smash them in the future, because they cannot catch up with us. But in the end the customers bought the software with the better UI and didn't look behind the scenes. So their decision was logical. Why pour money and time in parts of the software when noone wants to pay for this.

jhonovich 11y ago

It is valuable to determine what technology, not available in the past, would cause a reasonable insider to change their decisions if they could implement that technology.

normloman 11y ago

Founders presume the stupidity of the competition because they're arrogant. Silicon valley, with it's notion of creative destruction and disrupting the establishment, encourages arrogance. We're blinded by the notion that new always trumps old, so we never consider that the established industry has reasons behind how it runs.

Patrick_Devine 11y ago
I agree, but I think this is what makes SV wonderful. You have to be somewhat naive to think your approach is going to be better than the status quo, particularly when your competition is well established, and probably well capitalized. The reason why big companies can't turn on a dime is that they have a lot of people who work for them, and an existing customer base. It's difficult to align all of those people on a new, and potentially better way of solving a problem. It's not that they are collectively "idiots", it's that they have an established business with an established track record. This is quintessentially the Innovators Dilemma. Technology markets almost always move downmarket to the cheaper solution which at first looks like a "toy".
- normloman 11y ago
  Yes! I wish more people would actually read that book instead of throwing the word "disruption" around vaguely. After reading it, you'll realize the established business almost always has the advantage, and start ups only succeed in certain environments.

Bartweiss 11y ago

This is an excellent observation. When you encounter a suboptimal system, there's a substantial chance that it either produces some unnoticed benefit or results from some coordination problem that can't be overcome by "just not doing that". In either case, successful solutions have to work around the gap in the system rather than simply charging into it.

simonswords82 11y ago

Great article, taking the thinking further... Everybody watches their competitors, it's entirely natural. It's solid advice to study them, and try to stay/get ahead of them where possible. This doesn't just apply to app features, but every facet of the business across many disciplines (sales/marketing/development/back office etc). On the other hand, building a business based solely on a competitor's business decisions and not doing your own homework is the path to madness. We might take inspiration from our competitors, but we always check in with our customers next to make sure they actually want the feature. It's also our job to get feedback on not just what we're doing but also how we're planning to do it, as our users might have unique business requirements that our competitor's users do not.

riemannzeta 11y ago

Despite the flaws in the rational model of economics and the efficient market hypothesis more generally, I have always been fond of the more humble, observant posture it gives us in considering others' behavior. The flaws in the rational model are well-known. But as a presumption, it certainly works better than its opposite.

btbuildem 11y ago

Those folks are just being introspective, that's all..

jusben1369 11y ago

I think this is the classic problem of advice giving that's so prevalent in the startup community today. It won't be too long until we're all praising a tweet or article that talks about only those who brashly challenge the status quo and assume the entrenched players are vulnerable, bogged down with legacy issues and fat and lazy on an existing revenue stream are ripe for the disrupting. Those who sit back and say "Well maybe there's a reason they do things this way I'm not sure" aren't bold enough and won't be the recipients of the spoils of disruption. Not that this article is bad. It's just datapoint 107 that a founder has to reconcile with all the other competing advice.

amsilprotag 11y ago
Many times throughout the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast[1], a founder expresses the sentiment, "If I had known how hard it was going to be, I might not have started the company." The difficulty discounting has also been cited as the reason why many successful founders are young and inexperienced. So while hubris can lead to disastrous consequences for engineers, it could be viewed as an asset for inciting action. [1] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html

brianmcconnell 11y ago

The important thing in analyzing a competitor's behavior is to understand the incentives motivating that behavior. A common example in startupland is a company whose senior management has short term incentives that reward a fast exit over long term growth. That company may very well behave in ways that appear dumb to competitors with a long term focus. But if the "seasoned" CEO and his cronies get their compensation even in a mediocre deal, why bother trying to build a company for the ages when they can cash out, rest a bit and land in a similar situation at the next gig?

joseraul 11y ago

People may have a sense of superiority, especially smart ones. Chess world champion (and genius) Bobby Fischer once said: "My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don't take these things into consideration".

noobplusplus 11y ago

A nice article to manipulate your competitors from doing a market survey!

DrNuke 11y ago

Uh, I was thinking this article is more business-side than operational? Easily put: a business exists if it stays afloat and fences are often the way not to go under, even if they appear stupid from outside. Many times, fences are the only common ground between sellers and buyers. Removing fences is, a lot of times, pretty stupid = you geniuses operate at a loss and survive from artificial money or VCs until you are allowed to.

tomcam 11y ago

I have never disparaged my competitors, but I'm a small fry. I can say that during four years at Microsoft (1996-2000, Development Tools group) I never heard the products of competitors disparaged that way. In fact, there was a weekly presentation of competing products and invariably the interest was in where we were lacking, not what was bad about them. Likewise when customers came to visit us at trade shows my boss would sit politely through their compliments, then immediately jump to the question "So what don't you like about our product?" Fast forward to today. I'm friends with top people at a Really Big Guitar Company and a Huge Amplifier company. Even in private, these C-level execs show nothing but respect for products of their competitors. They are not ashamed to own and even personally use said products (especially vintage ones). It seems to me that dissing your competitors even privately can make you dangerously blind to the challenges they pose to you, set a bad example for your employees, and also restrict your job prospects should you decide to work for a competitor one day.

stuxnet79 11y ago
Interesting - thank you for sharing this.

colordrops 11y ago

This mindset can be seen in other systems of thought. There are a large number of species known to man, yet we somehow think that we are the pinnacle of the tree of life, despite the fact that this is statistically highly unlikely when only taking into account pure numbers. Considering the dimensions now accessible to us that were completely unknown even 500 years ago, it doesn't seem a large leap at all to posit that there are other dimensions we are currentlt unaware of that contain life forms in the same tree as ours that are far more advanced and perhaps even invisible to us.

lpolovets 11y ago

This is so true. As a investor, I hear a lot of pitches where the founders say their competitive advantage is that they execute better (the flip side of believing everyone else is dumb is believing you're especially smart). Do you know who else claims they "execute better"? Everyone. That kind of attitude usually reveals that a founder doesn't have a real sense of what makes their company special and defensible, and is a bit of a yellow flag for investors -- well, at least for me.

donarb 11y ago

Once again, xkcd explains all. https://xkcd.com/277/ https://xkcd.com/277/

ZoeZoeBee 11y ago

This works well when considering people in your own field, you know what it took for you to get there and you can assume they've had similar experiences. However when you are considering the general public it is best to presume stupidity and design with that in mind.

shurcooL 11y ago

Agree with the first 3 paragraphs so much, well put.

bro-stick 11y ago

Not much else to add. Presume a larger, smarter, better funded team is working stealthily in another office somewhere to kick our ass... anything else is complacency. Worse, following that path, leads to hubris at some juncture: excuses rationalizing cutting the wrong corners or shortchanging the customer that could prove fatal in a game of inches in the marketplace. There are at least a quadrillion ways to fail, and 99.997% of them will be my doing. Rational paranoia is healthy, because your product/service needs to be so well-regarded by people other than the team or supporters that it demoralizes potential adversaries that they don't want to compete. Even then, it still may not be currently as good in other key areas of focus as a competitors. (Btw, the Thiel view of not picking fights you can't dominate and Buffett's sticking to defensible business models is a good mindset to calibrate a venture's success per risk gut perception. And with timing, team and execution you might just make something that hits.)

andyidsinga 11y ago

see also: Sarah Silverman's bit on scientology and things that sound weird.

nitwit005 11y ago

This is probably not a correctable problem. People don't start businesses if they think the competition is highly competitive and intelligent. They start a business of they perceive a weakness in the market, or believe they have a unique capacity to succeed.

tr352 11y ago

Working in academia, I've experienced this too. I've read work in my field of research that I dismissed as bad work or not worthwhile, simply because I didn't fully understand them. Too complicated, strange background assumptions, not well motivated, etcetera. Then later, while developing my own work, I find that I end up with the same complications, that I'm forced to make the same background assumptions, and I have the same difficulty in motivating my choices.