4 ms·

This is an instance of the general issue of conflict across, what I like to call, the salesperson-slacker spectrum. Most researchers/academics lie somewhere on

This is an instance of the general issue of conflict across, what I like to call, the salesperson-slacker spectrum. Most researchers/academics lie somewhere on this spectrum. (Well I guess most human beings involved in any activity probably). On the one end are salespeople who love to make a mountain out of a molehill they just discovered. On the other, slackers are like the perfectionists who never get anything done because they never resolved their analysis-paralysis. There are very few who are exactly in the middle of the spectrum. The middle is a point of unstable equilibrium. You have to work very hard to stay there and can easily fall off to one side or the other.

tibbetts 9y ago
Your model fails to admit the possibility of researchers who do better or worse work.
- fizixer 9y ago
  Model fixed ('every' changed to 'most').
obstinate 9y ago
I wouldn't say perfectionism and sales-orientedness are on the same dimension. However, I have noticed that being given the hard-sell is more often than not associated with the product being sub par. A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. (My experience on this issue mostly deals with internal teams. I don't know how much this applies to external teams.) This is especially true when two products have teams of about equal size, experience, and expertise. Time spent selling is time not spent making a better product. All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.
- Swizec 9y ago
  And with exactly zero selling you have the best product you can make but one that nobody knows exists.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    True at theoretical extremes. I think the world would be a better place if the building/selling split was more like 99:1. But in a competitive environment, selling has a much better ROI than building, so here we are.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. This doesn't work in general, though. > All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better. Which, I believe, is a key to understanding why many (most?) of the things you can buy are utter crap, barely fit for the purpose they were made (if at all). It explains why so many successful SaaS businesses offer barely functional products. Because every hour spent selling is a hour spent not working on a product, and marketing has much better ROI than actually building something useful.
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  Thought experiment at the extremes: if you wait for your product to be literally perfect you will never sell anything. And of course you can sell a product that doesn't even exist. The dimension is confidence or maybe approval.
  - aisofteng 9y ago
    That's not a thought experiment, it's just a statement.
WaxProlix 9y ago
Is this just dunning-kruger effect under a different name, maybe? People discover a small portion of someone else's field, learn a bit and consider themselves well on the way to being experts without a clue how shallow their understanding is?
- fizixer 9y ago
  Dunning-kruger effect (DKE) maybe part of the salesperson mentality. But I see it as more than just DKE. You can be a DK without any pressure. With research/academia, - there is a lot of pressure to excel and show that your work is the next best thing since sliced bread. Another popular phrase is 'publish or perish' - the audience of such researchers are burdened with information overload, and that adds to the difficulty of having your voice heard, leading to a habit of taking shortcuts and trying to wow the audience when you really didn't do much.
sgt101 9y ago
Years ago almost all researchers in CS were genuinely trying to advance the topic, they published rarely. There were hyper stars, but almost all of the community thought very carefully before publishing anything. The problem was that the internal ranking of contributors that the community had (and it was pretty clear) was opaque to outsiders and obviously biased - there were few women or people of colour and age had a lot to do with your rank. On the other hand the set up was "useful" in that most people (who were white and male) seemed to be engaged in actual and useful work, and it was pretty clear where the state of the art was and what you needed to read and grasp to understand it. Right now many people are engaged in creating blizzards of papers, the mechanism of choice is the construction of factories for writing papers - an army of graduate students and post-docs - and the construction of communities of publication that are plausible enough to enable the extraction of funds from funding sources. Is this "useful" well - there is still bias and discrimination; there are not enough women (where enough is proportionate to the representation of women in the general population and their desire to do this kind of thing) and there are not enough people of colour - but there are more, which, thank god, I think most people think is a good thing. Research in some parts of CS is going very fast now as well, which is great! But, in HCI, Enterprise IT, Software Methodologies, things do not seem so good, and where things are going well, like in AI I wonder if this is coincidence (as in look, a thousand cores have arrived, I can do many things while waiting for my paper factory to make more papers). And it is expensive, very expensive. Where-as old CS involved a crowd of poorly paid sports jacket wearers, new CS involves a horde of hoodies, but the expense that worries me is the cognitive one - how to sort through the morass of chatter that conceals (intentionally, often, so as to enable the next seven or eight six page koans of review passing flim flam) the things I need (TM). So, some things are better in CS land. People who wouldn't have got a shout before are in with a shout (some of them) but instead of building an inclusive community of people really trying to do research we have build a thing that I hesitate to call a community that is more inclusive but contains many people who are doing things which are not research at all, in fact, they are kinda anti-research. And you can't get funding to do a field study, or publish a paper without waving some silly maths that means almost nothing about. And if you do publish, you'll have to cough up £2k one way or another, and no one will read the bloody thing.

tibbetts 9y ago

Your model fails to admit the possibility of researchers who do better or worse work.

fizixer 9y ago
Model fixed ('every' changed to 'most').

obstinate 9y ago

I wouldn't say perfectionism and sales-orientedness are on the same dimension. However, I have noticed that being given the hard-sell is more often than not associated with the product being sub par. A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. (My experience on this issue mostly deals with internal teams. I don't know how much this applies to external teams.) This is especially true when two products have teams of about equal size, experience, and expertise. Time spent selling is time not spent making a better product. All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better.

Swizec 9y ago
And with exactly zero selling you have the best product you can make but one that nobody knows exists.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  True at theoretical extremes. I think the world would be a better place if the building/selling split was more like 99:1. But in a competitive environment, selling has a much better ROI than building, so here we are.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
> A product or project that is doing very good work often doesn't have to sell quite as hard, because the work speaks for itself. This doesn't work in general, though. > All other things being equal, every hour spent selling is one less hour spent working on making your product better. Which, I believe, is a key to understanding why many (most?) of the things you can buy are utter crap, barely fit for the purpose they were made (if at all). It explains why so many successful SaaS businesses offer barely functional products. Because every hour spent selling is a hour spent not working on a product, and marketing has much better ROI than actually building something useful.
kthejoker2 9y ago
Thought experiment at the extremes: if you wait for your product to be literally perfect you will never sell anything. And of course you can sell a product that doesn't even exist. The dimension is confidence or maybe approval.
- aisofteng 9y ago
  That's not a thought experiment, it's just a statement.

WaxProlix 9y ago

Is this just dunning-kruger effect under a different name, maybe? People discover a small portion of someone else's field, learn a bit and consider themselves well on the way to being experts without a clue how shallow their understanding is?

fizixer 9y ago
Dunning-kruger effect (DKE) maybe part of the salesperson mentality. But I see it as more than just DKE. You can be a DK without any pressure. With research/academia, - there is a lot of pressure to excel and show that your work is the next best thing since sliced bread. Another popular phrase is 'publish or perish' - the audience of such researchers are burdened with information overload, and that adds to the difficulty of having your voice heard, leading to a habit of taking shortcuts and trying to wow the audience when you really didn't do much.

sgt101 9y ago

Years ago almost all researchers in CS were genuinely trying to advance the topic, they published rarely. There were hyper stars, but almost all of the community thought very carefully before publishing anything. The problem was that the internal ranking of contributors that the community had (and it was pretty clear) was opaque to outsiders and obviously biased - there were few women or people of colour and age had a lot to do with your rank. On the other hand the set up was "useful" in that most people (who were white and male) seemed to be engaged in actual and useful work, and it was pretty clear where the state of the art was and what you needed to read and grasp to understand it. Right now many people are engaged in creating blizzards of papers, the mechanism of choice is the construction of factories for writing papers - an army of graduate students and post-docs - and the construction of communities of publication that are plausible enough to enable the extraction of funds from funding sources. Is this "useful" well - there is still bias and discrimination; there are not enough women (where enough is proportionate to the representation of women in the general population and their desire to do this kind of thing) and there are not enough people of colour - but there are more, which, thank god, I think most people think is a good thing. Research in some parts of CS is going very fast now as well, which is great! But, in HCI, Enterprise IT, Software Methodologies, things do not seem so good, and where things are going well, like in AI I wonder if this is coincidence (as in look, a thousand cores have arrived, I can do many things while waiting for my paper factory to make more papers). And it is expensive, very expensive. Where-as old CS involved a crowd of poorly paid sports jacket wearers, new CS involves a horde of hoodies, but the expense that worries me is the cognitive one - how to sort through the morass of chatter that conceals (intentionally, often, so as to enable the next seven or eight six page koans of review passing flim flam) the things I need (TM). So, some things are better in CS land. People who wouldn't have got a shout before are in with a shout (some of them) but instead of building an inclusive community of people really trying to do research we have build a thing that I hesitate to call a community that is more inclusive but contains many people who are doing things which are not research at all, in fact, they are kinda anti-research. And you can't get funding to do a field study, or publish a paper without waving some silly maths that means almost nothing about. And if you do publish, you'll have to cough up £2k one way or another, and no one will read the bloody thing.