8 ms·

Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer (2012)

68 points by dsr12 8y ago

myWindoonn 8y ago
VC blog says that engineers should be less arrogant, more pliable towards VC requests. Cool story from people who want power and don't understand technical problems.
- eropple 8y ago
  Engineer says that arrogant jerks should be less arrogant and more decent towards their fellow human beings. What's your dismissive line this time?
  - jadedhacker 8y ago
    That's always true, the context matters a lot. The actual factors that characterize "arrogant" behavior are relevant to the discussion.
- zwieback 8y ago
  That's what you got out of reading the post? I didn't think the suggestion that teamwork is important would be controversial in any way.
  - typomatic 8y ago
    The post isn't about "Teamwork is important". The title is about "the arrogant engineer". You've elided the thing that made someone angry and then questioned them why they're angry about it. This is not good argumentation.
- ThorinJacobs 8y ago
  Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered? I've certainly run into arrogant engineers in the past. I spent the 2-3 weeks after the worst of them left cleaning up his bug-ridden, brittle code. If he had worked more collaboratively, it wouldn't have had to be that way.
  - myWindoonn 8y ago
    Correctly identified that a product would be a GDPR problem. Said product's main feature was deanonymizing non-consenting visitors. Insisted that certain metrics should be recorded, ended up identifying massive gaps in SLA, improved overall QoS. Was asked to give SRE and Devops advice to a team. Told them to document their "regular tasks"; that is, to write down a doc "How to Upgrade Frob Databases" so that they would have a way to do all the "Upgrade Frob Database for Customer #xxx" tickets on their kanban board. Got pushback. Wrote the docs for them anyway. Their kanban board drained over the next two sprints. Edit: In all cases, got massive pushback from management and never from devs nor engineers. Was called "arrogant", "troublemaker", "enabler", reprimanded, etc. You asked for examples, you get examples.
    - ThorinJacobs 8y ago
      Forgive me, but these don't sound like instances of arrogance. You've pointed out flaws in execution or feature, and I would do the same, but that's not arrogance. That's just doing your job as a developer. Maybe you achieved these in an arrogant way? I'm not going to deny that you can get things done being arrogant. But I don't think it's necessary to getting things done right.
      - pdimitar 8y ago
        I think he is saying that he got labeled as arrogant because he was not respecting internal office drama and human specifics which were getting in the way of him trying to do his job well. Is that arrogant? It's very context-specific but I'd claim that most of the times it is not. People calling other people offensive names in offices happens way too many times. Way too many managers and teams got too warm & fuzzy & comfy (and unproductive) and any newcomers who want to get shit done are labelled as "rocking the boat" although not literally but with a ton of euphemisms to conceal the core idea -- like those your parent commenter already mentioned ("troublemaker" etc.).
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered? Being arrogant and being perceived by other people as arrogant are two completely unrelated pairs of shoes. I personally would assume that many "nerds", for a lack of "social fluency" (I want to avoid the term "social skills", since in my experience they are not socially "unskilled", but rather think differently from many other people, which makes them often act somewhat clumsily), are perceived as arrogant, while they actually are not. On the other hand, I observe that many people who play the "acting humbly" game are actually deep inside quite arrogant and narcistic.
- mfringel 8y ago
  I'm not shy about calling people out on self-serving narratives. If that article pointed at "startups should be more pliant to VC narratives", I'd be throwing down the rhetorical penalty flag, calling Projection on the offense, and telling them to try again. That all being said... it appears that you're assuming facts not in evidence.
  - ljw1001 8y ago
    I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that OP would need some evidence to convince me that engineers are more arrogant than VC. As opposed to no evidence at all. This, after all, is a guy who works for pmarca, who, having achieved the status of "rich white person", went on to posit in public that the end of colonialism was bad for India: "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades." It's possible there were some nuances he was missing.
slededit 8y ago
The Big Bang Theory is an insulting characture. While some developers may like it - it's not really best way to endear yourself to a group of people.
- HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
  What annoys me most about that show is that 3 physicists and a mechanical engineer are often shown writing working software. That's rarely the case.
  - satori99 8y ago
    You have watched it enough to get annoyed by it? I saw part of an episode once, and I thought it was a program for children.
  - misnome 8y ago
    ...what? I mean, maybe some theoretical physicists spend all day doing maths and not simulating it, but almost all the physicists I know spend large amounts of time writing software; anything experimental or observational tends to produce large volumes of data with extremely bespoke analysis, and anything non-experimental probably involves lots of simulations. People usually have a shock when they start their PhD and find they have to learn to program, fast.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    Physicists and Mechanical engineers, often do write software. So do a whole host of other people.
    - Zeebrommer 8y ago
      I think the key word here is _working_ software...
      - Aloha 8y ago
        You don't need to be an expert to write working software. You don't even need to be an expert to write good software - you do need to be knowledgeable in that field to write maintainable software, but even experts in the field often write bad software in the name of expedience.
tptacek 8y ago
I'm not sure I've ever read a clumsier, more tone-deaf introduction to a blog post.
- crististm 8y ago
  What did you see in it that was so off? The idea, the choice of words, the "nerd credentials"? I'm trying to see what could have been avoided to make it better.
  - pdimitar 8y ago
    Too much stereotyping, almost zero context, bold claims on topics that are highly subjective and vary wildly from person to person. These were the things I found myself categorizing the post into as I was reading it.
duxup 8y ago
It sounds like he read a good book, but that article really doesn't say anything about actually "Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer", just that he read about it, kinda.
SirensOfTitan 8y ago
I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports metaphors. > I’ve had the privilege of spending my entire career in technology surrounded by wicked smart engineers. I’ve always been drawn to their raw intelligence, Spock-like rationality, sincere honesty, dry humor and quirkiness. With the immense popularity of the sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory”, I suppose I’m not alone in my appreciation of them. Almost none of the characters on Big Bang Theory were engineers, they were physicists. This article seems to conflate 'nerd' with 'engineer' on an incredibly surface level exploration. ... and before anything is actually stated, it moves over to use sports metaphors to accent how important teamwork is. The awful truth is that arrogance, inability to delegate, poor communication, poor ability to react to feedback are traits that are rampant in pretty much every industry, including VC. Picking out engineers are some type of specific 'archetype' especially bad at these skills is buying into awful stereotypes about engineers as if we have no social skills.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- justicezyx 8y ago
  Given that engineers are usually the one who do not talk about running a business, then it pretty much leave them as the only target of being arrogant, because they are not going to pin another group of people as arrogant...
- ISL 8y ago
  The caricatures on Big-Bang theory have some basis in truth, but are generally unlike the physicists I work with every day.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    I don't know any engineers who are obsessed with comic books, Star Trek, or Frodo.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
CompelTechnic 8y ago
I've got a pet theory. I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. To put it another way: The technical problem is so big that it occupies your brain for weeks and months at a time. Any social interaction requires context-switching out of the technical problem, which is expensive and stressful. Hence the stereotype that engineers are bad at social skills. If we were ever given enough time to decompress, we'd get right along.
- gnarbarian 8y ago
  It's because a lot of us are nerds. Also, more socially adept engineers tend to end up in leadership positions.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- eropple 8y ago
  Thing is, though--especially as time's gone on--more and more engineers I meet, completely and totally qualified people, are not bad at social skills. Many are quite engaging and charming people. And many who were socially deficient have gotten better over time when they've worked on it, myself included, with no matching decline in their ability to address that so-heavy "weight of technical decision." So I don't think "our big brains are so busy" is a great excuse, even were it a reason (and I don't think it is).
  - westoncb 8y ago
    Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated. I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible. I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests). BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions. Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it. When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind. And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.
Felz 8y ago
Beware the fundamental attribution error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error If somebody comes off as a jerk and doesn't appear to listen to you, it's almost certainly not because that is their "nature". They likely have reasons and incentives for acting like that. Possibly other people really _aren't_ helpful to them, and they haven't yet learned the fine political art of pretending otherwise. If you want to hire a bunch of very smart people who are also very pliable, and won't question you even if they disagree- well, good luck. Start with naive college grads, probably.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I really fail to see how your last paragraph has anything to do with the rest of the comment.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Animats 8y ago
Yet engineers tend not to be sociopaths, while that's common in top management.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- BadThink6655321 8y ago
  Not according to my taste in beer, black coffee and gin and tonic (https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods)
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  > while that's common in top management I've heard that before. It smacks of confirmation bias promulgated by envious people.
  - Animats 8y ago
    No, it's reasonably well accepted. See [1][2]. The trouble is, there's considerable overlap between the traits needed for becoming a leader and sociopathy. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#1a2faa624104 https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_workplace_sociopath/ https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_wor...
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      Your first link says 3%. That's not "common". The study's sample size was 203, a pretty low number for statistical confidence. I have no doubt it is "reasonably well accepted" that it is "common" for business leaders to be psychopaths, because it's what people want to believe, but the cited evidence for it doesn't show that at all.
      - 8y ago
imajes 8y ago
It's also worth noting that this article is 5 years old. Perhaps the tone is reflective of that..
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I was having a related debate on Twitter with YC's Michel Seibel earlier today [1]. My argument is that organizations, and most strikingly in technology startups & Venture, generally place no value on leadership ability. VC's and others will claim that they "invest in people." In my experience that simply means that "people," poorly defined, are one of the many vectors for which a company is judged. Primary of which is whether people get along well together, rather than if they can make hard leadership decisions in a way that is constructive and progressive. As a result, while "team" is a consideration, no qualities of leadership or management will be able to compete for venture dollars or talent with a company that is growing like crazy. Said more concisely: "Investors will always take an A+ Product with C- leadership over a C- Product with A+ leadership." That seems to make sense in the short term, but at scale, when leadership and management matters, things historically get hairy. In the even longer term, this attitude shapes an entire culture where covering bad management over with growth and revenues - something not unique to technology certainly. The primary argument I see in valuing traction over leadership in the early days, is that it's Hard to judge someone's leadership without working with them. I would agree with that, but I don't think it's any harder than any other level of technical due diligence. Where I think it's intractably harder, is when the person or team has absolutely no track record of leadership or management, like many young founders. The community assumes you can teach or coach your way into Leadership, and that's certainly true to some extent, but it underestimates how hard it is to do well, and how catastrophic it is when it goes really badly. On the other hand the old trope of "bringing in adult supervision" really undermines the concept of founder run and employee owned companies. I think the market would be better off in the long term funding and supporting founders with track records of leadership, but I honestly don't see that happening anytime soon. [1] https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554 https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554
- hinkley 8y ago
  My second employer out of college was a very charismatic man. Talked me out of quitting twice. The third time I went in and just repeated that this was my two week notice, without listening to a single thing he said, until he took the piece of paper in my hands. If I were a VC I can imagine wanting to stay away from people who can talk me into anything. I might end up funding another round after the building is already on fire. So I wonder if they are always clear on the difference between leadership and salesmanship. I'm not sure I can always distinguish the two, more's the pity.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
>> I’d give out a one-page handout I’d written titled, “Tips for Working Successfully in a Group.” We’d go over it, line by line. Some students found my tips beneath them. They rolled their eyes. But the most self-aware students embraced my advice Sounds like that arrogance didn't necessarily get fixed....
skookumchuck 8y ago
> I was stunned to find every one of these observations called out specifically by Randy in his lecture. That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone. It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone. It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone. Example from psycholoy: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old... By the way, the statements in the > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301#Early_research https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old... paragraph actually describe me rather badly (I am badly described using "wishy-washy statements"), so I believe this effect hardly works on me.
sanj 8y ago
Maybe we should all read the book instead on commenting on its review.
hinkley 8y ago
A little OT, but: > I spent part of my childhood dreaming of being Captain James T. Kirk… I seriously believe that I became a better teacher and colleague by watching Kirk run the Enterprise. Kirk was not the smartest guy on the ship. And that's the main reason I never liked Voyager. Kate Mulgrew's character was the smartest person on that ship, and she made sure everybody knew it. Which is a shame because I always thought she deserved more screen time.

68 points by dsr12 8y ago

VC blog says that engineers should be less arrogant, more pliable towards VC requests. Cool story from people who want power and don't understand technical problems.

eropple 8y ago
Engineer says that arrogant jerks should be less arrogant and more decent towards their fellow human beings. What's your dismissive line this time?
- jadedhacker 8y ago
  That's always true, the context matters a lot. The actual factors that characterize "arrogant" behavior are relevant to the discussion.
zwieback 8y ago
That's what you got out of reading the post? I didn't think the suggestion that teamwork is important would be controversial in any way.
- typomatic 8y ago
  The post isn't about "Teamwork is important". The title is about "the arrogant engineer". You've elided the thing that made someone angry and then questioned them why they're angry about it. This is not good argumentation.
ThorinJacobs 8y ago
Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered? I've certainly run into arrogant engineers in the past. I spent the 2-3 weeks after the worst of them left cleaning up his bug-ridden, brittle code. If he had worked more collaboratively, it wouldn't have had to be that way.
- myWindoonn 8y ago
  Correctly identified that a product would be a GDPR problem. Said product's main feature was deanonymizing non-consenting visitors. Insisted that certain metrics should be recorded, ended up identifying massive gaps in SLA, improved overall QoS. Was asked to give SRE and Devops advice to a team. Told them to document their "regular tasks"; that is, to write down a doc "How to Upgrade Frob Databases" so that they would have a way to do all the "Upgrade Frob Database for Customer #xxx" tickets on their kanban board. Got pushback. Wrote the docs for them anyway. Their kanban board drained over the next two sprints. Edit: In all cases, got massive pushback from management and never from devs nor engineers. Was called "arrogant", "troublemaker", "enabler", reprimanded, etc. You asked for examples, you get examples.
  - ThorinJacobs 8y ago
    Forgive me, but these don't sound like instances of arrogance. You've pointed out flaws in execution or feature, and I would do the same, but that's not arrogance. That's just doing your job as a developer. Maybe you achieved these in an arrogant way? I'm not going to deny that you can get things done being arrogant. But I don't think it's necessary to getting things done right.
    - pdimitar 8y ago
      I think he is saying that he got labeled as arrogant because he was not respecting internal office drama and human specifics which were getting in the way of him trying to do his job well. Is that arrogant? It's very context-specific but I'd claim that most of the times it is not. People calling other people offensive names in offices happens way too many times. Way too many managers and teams got too warm & fuzzy & comfy (and unproductive) and any newcomers who want to get shit done are labelled as "rocking the boat" although not literally but with a ton of euphemisms to conceal the core idea -- like those your parent commenter already mentioned ("troublemaker" etc.).
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the quality of the product you delivered? Being arrogant and being perceived by other people as arrogant are two completely unrelated pairs of shoes. I personally would assume that many "nerds", for a lack of "social fluency" (I want to avoid the term "social skills", since in my experience they are not socially "unskilled", but rather think differently from many other people, which makes them often act somewhat clumsily), are perceived as arrogant, while they actually are not. On the other hand, I observe that many people who play the "acting humbly" game are actually deep inside quite arrogant and narcistic.
mfringel 8y ago
I'm not shy about calling people out on self-serving narratives. If that article pointed at "startups should be more pliant to VC narratives", I'd be throwing down the rhetorical penalty flag, calling Projection on the offense, and telling them to try again. That all being said... it appears that you're assuming facts not in evidence.
- ljw1001 8y ago
  I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that OP would need some evidence to convince me that engineers are more arrogant than VC. As opposed to no evidence at all. This, after all, is a guy who works for pmarca, who, having achieved the status of "rich white person", went on to posit in public that the end of colonialism was bad for India: "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades." It's possible there were some nuances he was missing.

slededit 8y ago

The Big Bang Theory is an insulting characture. While some developers may like it - it's not really best way to endear yourself to a group of people.

HumanDrivenDev 8y ago
What annoys me most about that show is that 3 physicists and a mechanical engineer are often shown writing working software. That's rarely the case.
- satori99 8y ago
  You have watched it enough to get annoyed by it? I saw part of an episode once, and I thought it was a program for children.
- misnome 8y ago
  ...what? I mean, maybe some theoretical physicists spend all day doing maths and not simulating it, but almost all the physicists I know spend large amounts of time writing software; anything experimental or observational tends to produce large volumes of data with extremely bespoke analysis, and anything non-experimental probably involves lots of simulations. People usually have a shock when they start their PhD and find they have to learn to program, fast.
- Aloha 8y ago
  Physicists and Mechanical engineers, often do write software. So do a whole host of other people.
  - Zeebrommer 8y ago
    I think the key word here is _working_ software...
    - Aloha 8y ago
      You don't need to be an expert to write working software. You don't even need to be an expert to write good software - you do need to be knowledgeable in that field to write maintainable software, but even experts in the field often write bad software in the name of expedience.

tptacek 8y ago

I'm not sure I've ever read a clumsier, more tone-deaf introduction to a blog post.

crististm 8y ago
What did you see in it that was so off? The idea, the choice of words, the "nerd credentials"? I'm trying to see what could have been avoided to make it better.
- pdimitar 8y ago
  Too much stereotyping, almost zero context, bold claims on topics that are highly subjective and vary wildly from person to person. These were the things I found myself categorizing the post into as I was reading it.

duxup 8y ago

It sounds like he read a good book, but that article really doesn't say anything about actually "Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer", just that he read about it, kinda.

SirensOfTitan 8y ago

I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports metaphors. > I’ve had the privilege of spending my entire career in technology surrounded by wicked smart engineers. I’ve always been drawn to their raw intelligence, Spock-like rationality, sincere honesty, dry humor and quirkiness. With the immense popularity of the sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory”, I suppose I’m not alone in my appreciation of them. Almost none of the characters on Big Bang Theory were engineers, they were physicists. This article seems to conflate 'nerd' with 'engineer' on an incredibly surface level exploration. ... and before anything is actually stated, it moves over to use sports metaphors to accent how important teamwork is. The awful truth is that arrogance, inability to delegate, poor communication, poor ability to react to feedback are traits that are rampant in pretty much every industry, including VC. Picking out engineers are some type of specific 'archetype' especially bad at these skills is buying into awful stereotypes about engineers as if we have no social skills.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
justicezyx 8y ago
Given that engineers are usually the one who do not talk about running a business, then it pretty much leave them as the only target of being arrogant, because they are not going to pin another group of people as arrogant...
ISL 8y ago
The caricatures on Big-Bang theory have some basis in truth, but are generally unlike the physicists I work with every day.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I don't know any engineers who are obsessed with comic books, Star Trek, or Frodo.
s-shellfish 8y ago

CompelTechnic 8y ago

I've got a pet theory. I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. To put it another way: The technical problem is so big that it occupies your brain for weeks and months at a time. Any social interaction requires context-switching out of the technical problem, which is expensive and stressful. Hence the stereotype that engineers are bad at social skills. If we were ever given enough time to decompress, we'd get right along.

gnarbarian 8y ago
It's because a lot of us are nerds. Also, more socially adept engineers tend to end up in leadership positions.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eropple 8y ago
Thing is, though--especially as time's gone on--more and more engineers I meet, completely and totally qualified people, are not bad at social skills. Many are quite engaging and charming people. And many who were socially deficient have gotten better over time when they've worked on it, myself included, with no matching decline in their ability to address that so-heavy "weight of technical decision." So I don't think "our big brains are so busy" is a great excuse, even were it a reason (and I don't think it is).
- westoncb 8y ago
  Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated. I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible. I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests). BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions. Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it. When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind. And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.

Felz 8y ago

Beware the fundamental attribution error. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error If somebody comes off as a jerk and doesn't appear to listen to you, it's almost certainly not because that is their "nature". They likely have reasons and incentives for acting like that. Possibly other people really _aren't_ helpful to them, and they haven't yet learned the fine political art of pretending otherwise. If you want to hire a bunch of very smart people who are also very pliable, and won't question you even if they disagree- well, good luck. Start with naive college grads, probably.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I really fail to see how your last paragraph has anything to do with the rest of the comment.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Animats 8y ago

Yet engineers tend not to be sociopaths, while that's common in top management.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
BadThink6655321 8y ago
Not according to my taste in beer, black coffee and gin and tonic (https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods)
skookumchuck 8y ago
> while that's common in top management I've heard that before. It smacks of confirmation bias promulgated by envious people.
- Animats 8y ago
  No, it's reasonably well accepted. See [1][2]. The trouble is, there's considerable overlap between the traits needed for becoming a leader and sociopathy. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#1a2faa624104 https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_workplace_sociopath/ https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_wor...
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    Your first link says 3%. That's not "common". The study's sample size was 203, a pretty low number for statistical confidence. I have no doubt it is "reasonably well accepted" that it is "common" for business leaders to be psychopaths, because it's what people want to believe, but the cited evidence for it doesn't show that at all.
    - 8y ago

imajes 8y ago

It's also worth noting that this article is 5 years old. Perhaps the tone is reflective of that..

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

I was having a related debate on Twitter with YC's Michel Seibel earlier today [1]. My argument is that organizations, and most strikingly in technology startups & Venture, generally place no value on leadership ability. VC's and others will claim that they "invest in people." In my experience that simply means that "people," poorly defined, are one of the many vectors for which a company is judged. Primary of which is whether people get along well together, rather than if they can make hard leadership decisions in a way that is constructive and progressive. As a result, while "team" is a consideration, no qualities of leadership or management will be able to compete for venture dollars or talent with a company that is growing like crazy. Said more concisely: "Investors will always take an A+ Product with C- leadership over a C- Product with A+ leadership." That seems to make sense in the short term, but at scale, when leadership and management matters, things historically get hairy. In the even longer term, this attitude shapes an entire culture where covering bad management over with growth and revenues - something not unique to technology certainly. The primary argument I see in valuing traction over leadership in the early days, is that it's Hard to judge someone's leadership without working with them. I would agree with that, but I don't think it's any harder than any other level of technical due diligence. Where I think it's intractably harder, is when the person or team has absolutely no track record of leadership or management, like many young founders. The community assumes you can teach or coach your way into Leadership, and that's certainly true to some extent, but it underestimates how hard it is to do well, and how catastrophic it is when it goes really badly. On the other hand the old trope of "bringing in adult supervision" really undermines the concept of founder run and employee owned companies. I think the market would be better off in the long term funding and supporting founders with track records of leadership, but I honestly don't see that happening anytime soon. [1] https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554 https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554

hinkley 8y ago
My second employer out of college was a very charismatic man. Talked me out of quitting twice. The third time I went in and just repeated that this was my two week notice, without listening to a single thing he said, until he took the piece of paper in my hands. If I were a VC I can imagine wanting to stay away from people who can talk me into anything. I might end up funding another round after the building is already on fire. So I wonder if they are always clear on the difference between leadership and salesmanship. I'm not sure I can always distinguish the two, more's the pity.

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

>> I’d give out a one-page handout I’d written titled, “Tips for Working Successfully in a Group.” We’d go over it, line by line. Some students found my tips beneath them. They rolled their eyes. But the most self-aware students embraced my advice Sounds like that arrogance didn't necessarily get fixed....

skookumchuck 8y ago

> I was stunned to find every one of these observations called out specifically by Randy in his lecture. That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone. It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone.

wolfgke 8y ago
> That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone. It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone. Example from psycholoy: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old... By the way, the statements in the > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301#Early_research https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old... paragraph actually describe me rather badly (I am badly described using "wishy-washy statements"), so I believe this effect hardly works on me.

sanj 8y ago

Maybe we should all read the book instead on commenting on its review.

hinkley 8y ago

A little OT, but: > I spent part of my childhood dreaming of being Captain James T. Kirk… I seriously believe that I became a better teacher and colleague by watching Kirk run the Enterprise. Kirk was not the smartest guy on the ship. And that's the main reason I never liked Voyager. Kate Mulgrew's character was the smartest person on that ship, and she made sure everybody knew it. Which is a shame because I always thought she deserved more screen time.