5 ms·

Management and false certainty

71 points by awinter-py 8y ago

anotheryou 8y ago
Do you argue more with those above or below you?
- triztian 8y ago
  What about peers?
  - anotheryou 8y ago
    yes, peers ideally. I actually edited my post to clarify that the ideal is to be a team member of both groups, but than discarded it to keep the comment short. My question remains whether there are more conflicts with those who have the ultimate say in high level things or with those who handle or do the implementation.
tyingq 8y ago
Funny. This is why orgs like Bain and E&Y make tons of money. They give you the answer, and if things don't work out, you have a scapegoat.
baxtr 8y ago
I read piece, but in all honesty, I have a hard time to understand what the point is here. Express certainty if you’re leading?
- humanrebar 8y ago
  It's an argument for vigorous, not-personal, dialectic in design and planning meetings. It should be OK to make your best case. And it should be OK to get skeptical questions about your case. Or to hear an equivalent case for an alternative. It's an aggressive and competitive take on what a healthy collaborative environment should look like. I've seen other approaches, but, to be honest, they sort of exchange the aggressive for the passive-aggressive. A key line in the post: > ...an even slower way to uncover problems than argument is implementation. The thesis is that it is expensive to avoid argument or doing it in an incomplete or lackluster way.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Wow, the author of this seems to have an incredibly inflated sense of the value of his or her opinion, and seems to have very hostile preconceived notions of teammates’ errors and shallowness of their reasons for defending their choices. Not to mention that this part, at least, seems completely wrong, > “But an even slower way to uncover problems than argument is implementation.” Nope. Argument and architectural documents invite all manner of bikeshedding, often wasting time when you could just implement things and adjust the parts that end up causing problems. This is especially critical for taking a YAGNI approach. Architectural designs are such a slow waste of time that ends up leading you down a path where you don’t need various abstractions or extensibility hooks for reasons that only become clear after getting a minimal prototype going, looping in business team feedback, and seeing what fails or works. Basically, most arguments (in the way the author means it) are a really irritating form of premature optimization, and just implementing a first bad version is way more efficient.
- agentultra 8y ago
  Does this approach work for all software? I’m trying to think of whether I’d trust an autonomous vehicle if the authors followed this practice. There are methods to testing out designs that point us away from the diagrams and bikesheds. I’m drawing on my own experiences with various levels of formal methods of software construction.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    The first bad version need not be production-facing or operating in a situation with the same costs or risks. In fact, ideally it isn’t, and the feedback of the bad versions that get iterated is what actually ends up saving you from releasing a production beta version or something that injures somebody because you thought you spec’d everything in the architectural documents and the test plan, but of course you didn’t. I’m not saying arch planning has no place, only that it’s not a substitute for iterating on prototypes, and arguing about arch plans is often a waste of time.
    - agentultra 8y ago
dalbasal 8y ago
Another way to put it might be creating a functional, collective "truth." We are really good at X. Y is the future. We are going to do ABC. 1...2...3... Go Team! It doesn't need to be true, but it does need to create a unified mission, an esprit de corps. 92.6% of all leadership advice is about creating this sort of common truth, so that everyone can cooperate: Team building. Mission statements. Voices of authority. Core values. Crisis of leadership. Everyone sweeps the shed. Extreme ownership... There is a lot of worry these days, largely from the idealogical centre that we achieve a (public-political) consensus on "basic truths" anymore. There is no ground to stand on, in any kind d of divisided discussion. What they're refering to is an absence of "basic truths." Anyway, truths are "expensive." We have 3 scalable, but highly imperfect ways ways of creating truth in modern society: democracy, justice & science. Democracy is supposed to settle debates with the subjective will of the people. But, it's divisive as well as irrational and convinces half the population that the other half is evil. Science is genuinely good at determining truth, where the truth is scientifically determinable. But, science has also produced pseudo-science. Basically bad science that can answer questions which good science cannot: Freudianism/psychology, Marxism, liberal economics/metaphysics and all the "social sciences" claiming to have discovered the truth about women's issues, colonialism or whatnot. Law... Well... This is the most ancient and least believable source of truth. Common law and tiered court systems are almost modelled on cognitive dissonance, making sure new truths do not contradict old ones.

71 points by awinter-py 8y ago

anotheryou 8y ago

Do you argue more with those above or below you?

triztian 8y ago
What about peers?
- anotheryou 8y ago
  yes, peers ideally. I actually edited my post to clarify that the ideal is to be a team member of both groups, but than discarded it to keep the comment short. My question remains whether there are more conflicts with those who have the ultimate say in high level things or with those who handle or do the implementation.

tyingq 8y ago

Funny. This is why orgs like Bain and E&Y make tons of money. They give you the answer, and if things don't work out, you have a scapegoat.

baxtr 8y ago

I read piece, but in all honesty, I have a hard time to understand what the point is here. Express certainty if you’re leading?

humanrebar 8y ago
It's an argument for vigorous, not-personal, dialectic in design and planning meetings. It should be OK to make your best case. And it should be OK to get skeptical questions about your case. Or to hear an equivalent case for an alternative. It's an aggressive and competitive take on what a healthy collaborative environment should look like. I've seen other approaches, but, to be honest, they sort of exchange the aggressive for the passive-aggressive. A key line in the post: > ...an even slower way to uncover problems than argument is implementation. The thesis is that it is expensive to avoid argument or doing it in an incomplete or lackluster way.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Wow, the author of this seems to have an incredibly inflated sense of the value of his or her opinion, and seems to have very hostile preconceived notions of teammates’ errors and shallowness of their reasons for defending their choices. Not to mention that this part, at least, seems completely wrong, > “But an even slower way to uncover problems than argument is implementation.” Nope. Argument and architectural documents invite all manner of bikeshedding, often wasting time when you could just implement things and adjust the parts that end up causing problems. This is especially critical for taking a YAGNI approach. Architectural designs are such a slow waste of time that ends up leading you down a path where you don’t need various abstractions or extensibility hooks for reasons that only become clear after getting a minimal prototype going, looping in business team feedback, and seeing what fails or works. Basically, most arguments (in the way the author means it) are a really irritating form of premature optimization, and just implementing a first bad version is way more efficient.

agentultra 8y ago
Does this approach work for all software? I’m trying to think of whether I’d trust an autonomous vehicle if the authors followed this practice. There are methods to testing out designs that point us away from the diagrams and bikesheds. I’m drawing on my own experiences with various levels of formal methods of software construction.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  The first bad version need not be production-facing or operating in a situation with the same costs or risks. In fact, ideally it isn’t, and the feedback of the bad versions that get iterated is what actually ends up saving you from releasing a production beta version or something that injures somebody because you thought you spec’d everything in the architectural documents and the test plan, but of course you didn’t. I’m not saying arch planning has no place, only that it’s not a substitute for iterating on prototypes, and arguing about arch plans is often a waste of time.
  - agentultra 8y ago

dalbasal 8y ago

Another way to put it might be creating a functional, collective "truth." We are really good at X. Y is the future. We are going to do ABC. 1...2...3... Go Team! It doesn't need to be true, but it does need to create a unified mission, an esprit de corps. 92.6% of all leadership advice is about creating this sort of common truth, so that everyone can cooperate: Team building. Mission statements. Voices of authority. Core values. Crisis of leadership. Everyone sweeps the shed. Extreme ownership... There is a lot of worry these days, largely from the idealogical centre that we achieve a (public-political) consensus on "basic truths" anymore. There is no ground to stand on, in any kind d of divisided discussion. What they're refering to is an absence of "basic truths." Anyway, truths are "expensive." We have 3 scalable, but highly imperfect ways ways of creating truth in modern society: democracy, justice & science. Democracy is supposed to settle debates with the subjective will of the people. But, it's divisive as well as irrational and convinces half the population that the other half is evil. Science is genuinely good at determining truth, where the truth is scientifically determinable. But, science has also produced pseudo-science. Basically bad science that can answer questions which good science cannot: Freudianism/psychology, Marxism, liberal economics/metaphysics and all the "social sciences" claiming to have discovered the truth about women's issues, colonialism or whatnot. Law... Well... This is the most ancient and least believable source of truth. Common law and tiered court systems are almost modelled on cognitive dissonance, making sure new truths do not contradict old ones.