11 ms·

Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)

234 points by mastax 8y ago

dajonker 8y ago
As I remember from an HR course at business school, studies have shown that experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance (when hiring someone; all else being equal).
- daveguy 8y ago
  I'd have to see that study. It seems to me that experience gives you a lot of information about what is not as important that comes in handy even when you are "winging it" with something related. Also, "experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance...all else being equal" could mean a lot of things: 1) truly everything else being equal i.e. the person with less experience will do better. (surely that is not the case) 2) Of everything, considered equally, experience is the least indicative of performance compared to education, creative thinking, etc. Can you link those studies and clarify what is meant by "worst indicators"? Also, what job was that in the evaluated job performance? I know it's definitely not true for trade skills like woodworking.
  - trendia 8y ago
    > In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of intitial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20:1; the ratio of debugging times over 25:1; of program sizes 5:1; and of program execution speed about 10:1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity. (Code Complete, page 548) https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programming/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi...
    - wallacoloo 8y ago
      From what I can tell of the quote, it looks to be just the ability of an engineer to successfully code a new program? Does it touch on any of the other roles of a computer programmer, such as the ability to break a large task into smaller, incremental deliverables, arrange those deliverables in a way that allows parallelism, communicating with the rest of the team to actually make use of this parallelism, and before doing any of this actually verifying that the thing you’re planning to implement is really what the customer needs? And of course, such work is usually done within an existing system that you have to navigate and modify in a way that remains maintainable (for example, writing the right types of tests, and creating the appropriate types of abstractions). I would be stunned if one’s ability along those axes plateaus within just a couple years of experience. I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything seems to be very well-polished. At both places, people generally are similar in their ability to write code that does a specific thing, but there’s a night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things, because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In other words, I feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my coworkers fresh out of college.
- deleted 8y ago
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- im3w1l 8y ago
  "all else being equal" isn't possible. Normally it's a convenient illusion but here it leads us astray. You need to carefully think about what you are controlling for and how and what that will mean. As an example do you control for total number of x-size projects completed, or do you control for x-size projects completed per time in the career? It should be clear that you cannot keep them both equal, you have to choose one or the other (or neither I suppose).
ssivark 8y ago
I wonder whether this is correlated with the adoption of the “fake it till you make it” mantra.
chrisbolt 8y ago
(2014)
deleted 8y ago
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antonvs 8y ago
This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives. Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Although "seems" is the operative word: if it weren't for this effect, we'd see many more bridges and buildings collapsing, ships sinking, etc. It's just that many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people "winging it", and that's what the article focuses on.
- jamesrcole 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. ... many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people This seems to imply "if only everyone got adequate training". It's not like that, though. There's a lot of important, worthwhile endeavours that inherently involve having to figure things out as you go.
- B0btheBuilder 8y ago
  Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that politicians and newspaper executives are untrained.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge. In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.
rossdavidh 8y ago
Should have a (2014) in the title
ardit33 8y ago
And that is not true at all, especially in sports. When you just starting playing a new sport, you are still learning and going along while making a lot of mistakes. After few years of playing you learn enough (by experience or training), to know what to do and how to act. (think shooting dribling, positioning in soccer). If you played your 'younger' self, you'd run circle around that person. Hence training and experience matters a lot. Same with engineering. While products change, some of the same patterns and problems keep repeating over and over, and after few years of work you know how to deal with them, avoid common pitfalls, etc.... So, people are truly "winging it" only when they are thrown to new situations/discipline, but both experience and deliberate training gets you to a level when you can anticipate events to a certain degree, and be proactive towards them. That's not "just winging" anymore.
- crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
  If one constrains themselves to arenas where there's a level of finite class of situations one might encounter, you're right. Venture outside the comfortable and it's back to winging it, though with more proficiency and intuition, maybe. Everything is a skill, including winging it.
- fphhotchips 8y ago
  I'd argue sports is the exact example where not only is everyone winging it, but where you must wing it to be successful. How good you are at winging it is defined by your training, but in a competitive situation, if you're not constantly improvising to match the current state of play, then your play will be entirely predictable and as a result you'll be easily beaten. Think about a football team that runs one of three corners every time. After maybe a match, they'll be beaten by every defense. Now think about a football team that makes subtle improvisations on every corner they run based on the defense they're up against. Much, much harder to study and defend.
  - joenathanone 8y ago
    There is an element of winging it in every profession but not 'totally' winging it. Experience, training and practice matter.
jiveturkey 8y ago
I think the OP was winging it. This is from 2014.
deleted 8y ago
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drawkbox 8y ago
Humans are a differentiation machine, they follow along known branches until they break into something new. There they can create a new branch where they might be first or one of a few new minds in that area, in that case, 'winging it' may be employed but it is also based on experience in what to do with unknowns. With any production/consumer scenario it is usually 1 to 1000 or more ratio. Most people aren't making new territory all the time, even inventors or creators. The fact is most of human existence is observing, studying, thinking, following, viewing existing knowledge while very few interact or create new production or are producing at one time on one subject or concentration, we are usually part of the 1000, though we all are the 1s for something. All of that preparation prepares you for the moment where you meet new ground that must be entered and conquered. So new areas, even for the most experienced, are essentially 'winging it' uncharted territory until it becomes a solid branch of growth in the individual or industry/area of expertise. It is a bit like practice, which is a series of sketches until the time you have to use that skill in production where the refined lines, inking and color are put together, the art of progression/innovation comes together for production. Then comes the 'here we go' and 'let's do this' moment where even experienced and skilled professionals take flight with the butterflies in their stomach of nervousness and excitement to conquer unknowns in uncharted territory with their pack of experience and knowledge, the experience/book smarts meet the reality/street, the adventure begins.
davnicwil 8y ago
I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any kind of profession, would be super smart and really know their game inside out. When I started my career I assumed frankly that my opinions were wrong, because of this. In my first job there were a lot of aspects that were almost the parody of how not to do things, yet even though I sensed this intuitively I convinced myself probably for the first year that I must be wrong and this must just be the way things are done in industry. That I would eventually figure out that this was the right way to do things. It's quite funny to look back on that in retrospect. What I find most impressive about tales of young company builders and leaders, the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. How did they know that they had the ability to build companies such as theirs -- surely were it possible one of the adults with 10-20 years industry experience would have figured it out already? How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults (many of whom I'm sure challenged them and competed with them for influence) as their companies grew? Truly awe inspiring.
- yelloweyes 8y ago
  > the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that. > How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing. Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.
  - lostgame 8y ago
    I think this is really a huge part of it. Right place, right time. There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other. Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.
newname2018 8y ago
That old maxim rings true: Fake it till you make it.
pdonis 8y ago
So the evidence this article is based on is...a Reddit thread? Excuse me? Somebody is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.
- jameslk 8y ago
  Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here (also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.
  - cafebabbe 8y ago
    Aha, but, to paraphrase the internet-favorite Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it :)
    - jameslk 8y ago
      I know you're probably just kidding, but I'm going to be pedantic anyway and link you to this: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
      - cafebabbe 8y ago
        Yes, just joking, of course. Interesting link nonetheless, thanks.
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it Only if you either have no objective feedback on your actual performance, or you ignore such feedback when you get it.
- hylianwarrior 8y ago
  I like to imagine that someday, somehow this HN thread will be referenced in an article somewhere. The irony would be satisfying.
Flozzin 8y ago
This article reminds me of a clip from an interview with Obama recently. https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716 https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716 He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people." Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his observation that he thought everyone was good at their job when he was a child. But when he grew up and worked with people he realized that there are so many people that are bad at their jobs.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  I guess Obama never met people like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack.
  - orev 8y ago
    You’re selecting for exemplary people in your example, while Obama and Corolla are talking about a wide group of people in an industry. Your comment does not hold water.
  - empath75 8y ago
    I bet John Carmack is just winging it in a lot of aspects of his life, too.
    - Applejinx 8y ago
      Hearing Jonathan Blow talk about John Carmack is fascinating. It's in some video or other, as it's a story Blow tells on himself when giving talks. He'd gone over the Doom source code when Carmack had open-sourced it, and Blow was appalled, because it was loaded with inefficient, crude, not-optimized stuff. Essentially, Doom source code was dumb and primitive. Jonathan Blow's initial reaction was horror and contempt, because the code gave the impression that Carmack was just winging it most uncaringly. Later, Blow decided that this was a process of value judgement, and himself turned against trying to optimize and refine every little code style, in favor of doing stuff that didn't take nearly as much brain and ability to retain state. He took some of Carmack's dumbness and crudeness as an example of where to place your attention. This is totally valid, while at the same time being a conscious decision to 'just wing it' in many senses. I do this myself, even on public-facing code. In a sense it's optimization and choosing to focus on areas where I can be more useful. At the same time, I'm literally just winging it and some of the things I'm not doing, I'm not doing because I'm too dumb to know how, and would be distracted by trying to learn. If I had great mastery of all these things it would affect my choices, but when I don't I'll take the Carmack path and ostentatiously do the 'crude' thing so I can lean on what I do have going for me.
agumonkey 8y ago
Question is: how do you reconcile that knowledge with the hiring process when you don't like to lie.
bitxbit 8y ago
Three buckets: (1) people who figured out how to do it right, (2) people who’s yet to figure out how to do it right but can spot the things done right, and (3) everyone else.
- wallacoloo 8y ago
  No need to bucket like this. Rather split this into a 2-dimensional space where one axis is “ability to do things effectively” and the other is “ability to spot which things lead others to success”. The buckets suggest that there’s a point at which a person is no longer able to learn from others, which is dishonest.
bilifuduo 8y ago
If you're interested in this concept of "everyone is winging it," here's a collection of articles exploring this concept applied to other areas (like startups + design): https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635 https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635
jancsika 8y ago
So Claude Shannon was "totally just winging it" when he wrote A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits?
zachd1_618 8y ago
I rarely comment on articles but this resonates so strongly with me. It goes beyond the pervasive “imposter syndrome”, and I think the point here ought to be emphasized. Nobody knows what they’re doing, so throw out the perceived deference and join them with full confidence and determination. Anecdotal self promotion: I grew up doing manual labor (digging holes) and whatnot thinking that the AP kids had their shit together. Same once I started AP thinking about college. Then grad school in Aero engineering. Then real aero engineers. Then real software engineers once I transitioned into true software in ad tech. TLDR even when surrounded by ridiculously smart people and out of your depth, I find that holding back because “they must know what they’re talking about” is an unproductive mindset. It must be universal, and I actually find that to be an encouraging fact. People aren’t predestined to their task and even as a noob to a field or discipline, you may have valid insight.
ummonk 8y ago
When you're a kid you think adults know what they're doing and that for any issue there are people in charge who can and do make sure everything works out. The biggest thing you learn by growing up is that this is most definitely not the case. Sometimes the person at the wheel is just winging it, and often there really isn't even anyone at the wheel steering things.
e17a 8y ago
N. N. Taleb has been harping away at this for ages now. Here are some great quotes: > Electricians, barbers, gardeners, surgeons, tango dancers, are experts. Not economists. > The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the electrician, dentist, are experts, while the journalist, State Department bureaucrat, and macroeconomist are not. Since then, there has been a global movement against the pseudo-expert, the serial incompetence of a certain class of babbling and pompous operatives across bureaucrato-academic professions. Which leads to the question: who is the real expert? Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy.
yarrel 8y ago
The first time someone told something me this they felt they were being helpful and reassuring. Why did everyone else know what to do and I didn't? Oh don't worry, nobody does. Nope. That's not helpful. If there's no rulebook I can learn then that makes it worse not better. Lacking an innate ability is not an improvement on lacking some learnable knowledge.
fenwick67 8y ago
This advice is particularly good for perfectionists like myself.
picsao 8y ago
and that should not be enough.. We should demand responsible behavior and institutions should reward those capable to think in the long run.
deleted 8y ago
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234 points by mastax 8y ago

As I remember from an HR course at business school, studies have shown that experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance (when hiring someone; all else being equal).

daveguy 8y ago
I'd have to see that study. It seems to me that experience gives you a lot of information about what is not as important that comes in handy even when you are "winging it" with something related. Also, "experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance...all else being equal" could mean a lot of things: 1) truly everything else being equal i.e. the person with less experience will do better. (surely that is not the case) 2) Of everything, considered equally, experience is the least indicative of performance compared to education, creative thinking, etc. Can you link those studies and clarify what is meant by "worst indicators"? Also, what job was that in the evaluated job performance? I know it's definitely not true for trade skills like woodworking.
- trendia 8y ago
  > In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of intitial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20:1; the ratio of debugging times over 25:1; of program sizes 5:1; and of program execution speed about 10:1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity. (Code Complete, page 548) https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programming/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi...
  - wallacoloo 8y ago
    From what I can tell of the quote, it looks to be just the ability of an engineer to successfully code a new program? Does it touch on any of the other roles of a computer programmer, such as the ability to break a large task into smaller, incremental deliverables, arrange those deliverables in a way that allows parallelism, communicating with the rest of the team to actually make use of this parallelism, and before doing any of this actually verifying that the thing you’re planning to implement is really what the customer needs? And of course, such work is usually done within an existing system that you have to navigate and modify in a way that remains maintainable (for example, writing the right types of tests, and creating the appropriate types of abstractions). I would be stunned if one’s ability along those axes plateaus within just a couple years of experience. I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything seems to be very well-polished. At both places, people generally are similar in their ability to write code that does a specific thing, but there’s a night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things, because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In other words, I feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my coworkers fresh out of college.
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im3w1l 8y ago
"all else being equal" isn't possible. Normally it's a convenient illusion but here it leads us astray. You need to carefully think about what you are controlling for and how and what that will mean. As an example do you control for total number of x-size projects completed, or do you control for x-size projects completed per time in the career? It should be clear that you cannot keep them both equal, you have to choose one or the other (or neither I suppose).

ssivark 8y ago

I wonder whether this is correlated with the adoption of the “fake it till you make it” mantra.

chrisbolt 8y ago

(2014)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

antonvs 8y ago

This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do. Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives. Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Although "seems" is the operative word: if it weren't for this effect, we'd see many more bridges and buildings collapsing, ships sinking, etc. It's just that many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people "winging it", and that's what the article focuses on.

jamesrcole 8y ago
> Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. ... many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people This seems to imply "if only everyone got adequate training". It's not like that, though. There's a lot of important, worthwhile endeavours that inherently involve having to figure things out as you go.
B0btheBuilder 8y ago
Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that politicians and newspaper executives are untrained.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge. In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.

rossdavidh 8y ago

Should have a (2014) in the title

ardit33 8y ago

And that is not true at all, especially in sports. When you just starting playing a new sport, you are still learning and going along while making a lot of mistakes. After few years of playing you learn enough (by experience or training), to know what to do and how to act. (think shooting dribling, positioning in soccer). If you played your 'younger' self, you'd run circle around that person. Hence training and experience matters a lot. Same with engineering. While products change, some of the same patterns and problems keep repeating over and over, and after few years of work you know how to deal with them, avoid common pitfalls, etc.... So, people are truly "winging it" only when they are thrown to new situations/discipline, but both experience and deliberate training gets you to a level when you can anticipate events to a certain degree, and be proactive towards them. That's not "just winging" anymore.

crawfordcomeaux 8y ago
If one constrains themselves to arenas where there's a level of finite class of situations one might encounter, you're right. Venture outside the comfortable and it's back to winging it, though with more proficiency and intuition, maybe. Everything is a skill, including winging it.
fphhotchips 8y ago
I'd argue sports is the exact example where not only is everyone winging it, but where you must wing it to be successful. How good you are at winging it is defined by your training, but in a competitive situation, if you're not constantly improvising to match the current state of play, then your play will be entirely predictable and as a result you'll be easily beaten. Think about a football team that runs one of three corners every time. After maybe a match, they'll be beaten by every defense. Now think about a football team that makes subtle improvisations on every corner they run based on the defense they're up against. Much, much harder to study and defend.
- joenathanone 8y ago
  There is an element of winging it in every profession but not 'totally' winging it. Experience, training and practice matter.

jiveturkey 8y ago

I think the OP was winging it. This is from 2014.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

drawkbox 8y ago

Humans are a differentiation machine, they follow along known branches until they break into something new. There they can create a new branch where they might be first or one of a few new minds in that area, in that case, 'winging it' may be employed but it is also based on experience in what to do with unknowns. With any production/consumer scenario it is usually 1 to 1000 or more ratio. Most people aren't making new territory all the time, even inventors or creators. The fact is most of human existence is observing, studying, thinking, following, viewing existing knowledge while very few interact or create new production or are producing at one time on one subject or concentration, we are usually part of the 1000, though we all are the 1s for something. All of that preparation prepares you for the moment where you meet new ground that must be entered and conquered. So new areas, even for the most experienced, are essentially 'winging it' uncharted territory until it becomes a solid branch of growth in the individual or industry/area of expertise. It is a bit like practice, which is a series of sketches until the time you have to use that skill in production where the refined lines, inking and color are put together, the art of progression/innovation comes together for production. Then comes the 'here we go' and 'let's do this' moment where even experienced and skilled professionals take flight with the butterflies in their stomach of nervousness and excitement to conquer unknowns in uncharted territory with their pack of experience and knowledge, the experience/book smarts meet the reality/street, the adventure begins.

davnicwil 8y ago

I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience. When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any kind of profession, would be super smart and really know their game inside out. When I started my career I assumed frankly that my opinions were wrong, because of this. In my first job there were a lot of aspects that were almost the parody of how not to do things, yet even though I sensed this intuitively I convinced myself probably for the first year that I must be wrong and this must just be the way things are done in industry. That I would eventually figure out that this was the right way to do things. It's quite funny to look back on that in retrospect. What I find most impressive about tales of young company builders and leaders, the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. How did they know that they had the ability to build companies such as theirs -- surely were it possible one of the adults with 10-20 years industry experience would have figured it out already? How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults (many of whom I'm sure challenged them and competed with them for influence) as their companies grew? Truly awe inspiring.

yelloweyes 8y ago
> the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years. They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that. > How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing. Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.
- lostgame 8y ago
  I think this is really a huge part of it. Right place, right time. There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other. Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.

newname2018 8y ago

That old maxim rings true: Fake it till you make it.

pdonis 8y ago

So the evidence this article is based on is...a Reddit thread? Excuse me? Somebody is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.

jameslk 8y ago
Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here (also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.
- cafebabbe 8y ago
  Aha, but, to paraphrase the internet-favorite Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it :)
  - jameslk 8y ago
    I know you're probably just kidding, but I'm going to be pedantic anyway and link you to this: http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
    - cafebabbe 8y ago
      Yes, just joking, of course. Interesting link nonetheless, thanks.
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > thinking you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it Only if you either have no objective feedback on your actual performance, or you ignore such feedback when you get it.
hylianwarrior 8y ago
I like to imagine that someday, somehow this HN thread will be referenced in an article somewhere. The irony would be satisfying.

Flozzin 8y ago

This article reminds me of a clip from an interview with Obama recently. https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716 https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716 He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people." Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his observation that he thought everyone was good at their job when he was a child. But when he grew up and worked with people he realized that there are so many people that are bad at their jobs.

pmoriarty 8y ago
I guess Obama never met people like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack.
- orev 8y ago
  You’re selecting for exemplary people in your example, while Obama and Corolla are talking about a wide group of people in an industry. Your comment does not hold water.
- empath75 8y ago
  I bet John Carmack is just winging it in a lot of aspects of his life, too.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    Hearing Jonathan Blow talk about John Carmack is fascinating. It's in some video or other, as it's a story Blow tells on himself when giving talks. He'd gone over the Doom source code when Carmack had open-sourced it, and Blow was appalled, because it was loaded with inefficient, crude, not-optimized stuff. Essentially, Doom source code was dumb and primitive. Jonathan Blow's initial reaction was horror and contempt, because the code gave the impression that Carmack was just winging it most uncaringly. Later, Blow decided that this was a process of value judgement, and himself turned against trying to optimize and refine every little code style, in favor of doing stuff that didn't take nearly as much brain and ability to retain state. He took some of Carmack's dumbness and crudeness as an example of where to place your attention. This is totally valid, while at the same time being a conscious decision to 'just wing it' in many senses. I do this myself, even on public-facing code. In a sense it's optimization and choosing to focus on areas where I can be more useful. At the same time, I'm literally just winging it and some of the things I'm not doing, I'm not doing because I'm too dumb to know how, and would be distracted by trying to learn. If I had great mastery of all these things it would affect my choices, but when I don't I'll take the Carmack path and ostentatiously do the 'crude' thing so I can lean on what I do have going for me.

agumonkey 8y ago

Question is: how do you reconcile that knowledge with the hiring process when you don't like to lie.

bitxbit 8y ago

Three buckets: (1) people who figured out how to do it right, (2) people who’s yet to figure out how to do it right but can spot the things done right, and (3) everyone else.

wallacoloo 8y ago
No need to bucket like this. Rather split this into a 2-dimensional space where one axis is “ability to do things effectively” and the other is “ability to spot which things lead others to success”. The buckets suggest that there’s a point at which a person is no longer able to learn from others, which is dishonest.

bilifuduo 8y ago

If you're interested in this concept of "everyone is winging it," here's a collection of articles exploring this concept applied to other areas (like startups + design): https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635 https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635

jancsika 8y ago

So Claude Shannon was "totally just winging it" when he wrote A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits?

zachd1_618 8y ago

I rarely comment on articles but this resonates so strongly with me. It goes beyond the pervasive “imposter syndrome”, and I think the point here ought to be emphasized. Nobody knows what they’re doing, so throw out the perceived deference and join them with full confidence and determination. Anecdotal self promotion: I grew up doing manual labor (digging holes) and whatnot thinking that the AP kids had their shit together. Same once I started AP thinking about college. Then grad school in Aero engineering. Then real aero engineers. Then real software engineers once I transitioned into true software in ad tech. TLDR even when surrounded by ridiculously smart people and out of your depth, I find that holding back because “they must know what they’re talking about” is an unproductive mindset. It must be universal, and I actually find that to be an encouraging fact. People aren’t predestined to their task and even as a noob to a field or discipline, you may have valid insight.

ummonk 8y ago

When you're a kid you think adults know what they're doing and that for any issue there are people in charge who can and do make sure everything works out. The biggest thing you learn by growing up is that this is most definitely not the case. Sometimes the person at the wheel is just winging it, and often there really isn't even anyone at the wheel steering things.

e17a 8y ago

N. N. Taleb has been harping away at this for ages now. Here are some great quotes: > Electricians, barbers, gardeners, surgeons, tango dancers, are experts. Not economists. > The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the electrician, dentist, are experts, while the journalist, State Department bureaucrat, and macroeconomist are not. Since then, there has been a global movement against the pseudo-expert, the serial incompetence of a certain class of babbling and pompous operatives across bureaucrato-academic professions. Which leads to the question: who is the real expert? Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy.

yarrel 8y ago

The first time someone told something me this they felt they were being helpful and reassuring. Why did everyone else know what to do and I didn't? Oh don't worry, nobody does. Nope. That's not helpful. If there's no rulebook I can learn then that makes it worse not better. Lacking an innate ability is not an improvement on lacking some learnable knowledge.

fenwick67 8y ago

This advice is particularly good for perfectionists like myself.

picsao 8y ago

and that should not be enough.. We should demand responsible behavior and institutions should reward those capable to think in the long run.

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