14 ms·

The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone w

• Veen 7y ago
  If bullshitters rise to the top with very little work or knowledge, then perhaps being a bullshitter is the smart choice for people of a certain disposition.
  • noonespecial 7y ago
    Perhaps for them in a narrow sense, but considering the damage they do, I'm to the point where I'd be willing to have companies pay them their inflated salaries just to stay home and not interfere.
  • wallace_f 7y ago
    You're right that bullshit sells well. From OP, something about it runs in the family: >socio-economically advantaged teenagers are more likely to be bullshitters than their disadvantaged peers. I had the misfortune of seeing this up close in consulting in tech. Your customers are idiots, that's why they hired "experts." They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you). They hire based on emotions, recommendations and epaulettes because that's the best they can do. All three of those are completely subjected to cronyism, in my observation. My experience here made me a firm believer that institutions and businesses really need to be allowed to fail. The most epic stupidity (and toxic politics) always comes from the ones that were furthest from that principle. And I'm never doing that again. There is nothing I can buy with paychecks from interacting with that toxic, idiotic side of humanity that makes it worth it.
    • mgkimsal 7y ago
      > They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you). I've had this realization many times that, in most cases, I likely sound exactly the same as the 5 BS artists that came before me, and there's very little I can do to distinguish myself outside of long-term relationship building and delivery. Others before me have said the exact same things, just not delivered (or hosed up a project beyond belief). Me saying something may sound exactly the same as the previous X times - they've heard it all before. I've got a few clients I've worked with for years - they trust me implicitly because I've delivered (and when I haven't, I've made good, pushed through, fixed stuff that needed fixing, etc). After years of experience, there's deep trust. When I say "XYZ", they have a high degree of confidence in my ability to deliver. Outside of spending years developing those relationships, I'm not sure how else you can get a level of confidence even close to that.
    • kthejoker2 7y ago
      "Consulting doesn't work because you can't sell consulting to a competent organization and you can't deliver consulting to an incompetent one." Hale's Law* *i.e. me.
  • majormajor 7y ago
    Yes, that would be the problem. Parent poster is saying we need to stop letting it be that easy for them.
  • maxxxxx 7y ago
    You need to find the right balance between bullshitting and delivering . Elon Musk or Steve Jobs are first class bullshitters but they also back it up quite often (not always though).
    • mgkimsal 7y ago
      and sometimes people just think you're bullshitting because they have no idea that you can actually deliver (or that anyone can deliver) but you know that you can (and perhaps even have done so).
    • iMarv 7y ago
      Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are and were highly intelligent people. For them it is less about bullshitting but more about their dreams and goals. I do not believe Elon Musk is bullshitting when giving timeframes, he knows what is possible technically, but fails to predict how long it takes to deliver
      • Veen 7y ago
        I don’t think there is any inverse relationship between intelligence and a tendency to bullshit. There are smart bullshitters and stupid ones. The stupid ones tend to be obvious. The very smart ones end up running countries and corporations.
  • asveikau 7y ago
    Smart for the individual. Bad for the whole. IMO people should think more of the whole, more often.
• tru3_power 7y ago
  Dude I struggle with this everyday. When I first started off in my career I was so nervous to express any technical ideas or questions in front of other people because I thought I was stupid- as I started progressing in my career I learned that a lot of the people I encountered at work who were ultra confident (and probably attributed to my tech self-consciousness) actually knew way less than I thought. I still don’t consider myself to be good at what I do, but I do know what I do know, and more importantly I know what I do not know.
  • stelfer 7y ago
    The realization that I came to was that by speaking up I was usually asking a question that many people were not asking; by providing a strong opinion it would help to catalyze deliberate action. If you stay silent we'll never get anything really done.
    • plutonorm 7y ago
      Yeah, but I find I usually take a social hit by asking the question. A good 80% of those listening will think that you simply don't understand something. The other 20% are either indifferent or actively threatened by the observation. It doesn't pay to speak up about anything, you just get talked down to by those who are bullshitting.
      • AnimalMuppet 7y ago
        Not sure I agree with that. When you ask a question, you may be speaking for most of the room. It's just that you're the only one bold enough to say it. And if you are speaking for most of the room, you won't take a social hit for the question. Quite the opposite. (Of course, it can be that you just weren't paying attention. For questions that come out of that situation, you may in fact take a social hit, and perhaps appropriately. If you just don't understand something, you probably shouldn't take a hit, but you may do so in more toxic environments.)
        • Terr_ 7y ago
• will_brown 7y ago
  >The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote “fake it till you make it” so hard. Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs...Fyre fest...VR/AR...Theranos From top down the industry promotes bullshitters.
  • kuzehanka 7y ago
    I always interpreted 'fake it till you make it' as 'promise what you could do with sufficient resources'. That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible. You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.
    • mwfunk 7y ago
      "Fake it till you make it" means, sound like you're way more confident about what you're saying than you actually are, until you become the sort of person you're presenting yourself as. It's not people making up random shit, it's people making up totally plausible sounding shit.
      • bradjohnson 7y ago
        If the ones that are buying that shit don't know enough about how it works, it's not that difficult for a bullshitter to make the implausible sound plausible.
      • crankylinuxuser 7y ago
        "Fake it tll you make it" was also a saying to counteract the impostor syndrome telling themselves that 'theyre worthless, cant do anything, know nothing, etc' Bullshitters never really followed this. It's the Trump game. Keep talking, making stuff up, while moving faster in the direction you want. And it's too hard to keep up, so implicitly people believe portions of it.
• filleokus 7y ago
  I have always thought that the hierarchical system used for doctors here in Sweden could be applicable to tech. Doctors here specialise in a field after some time of general practice and then some of them become "överläkare" (lit. superior physician), and have both deep expertise in their area but also some managerial responsibility for their department. Of course there is hospital administration etc, but the senior doctors still provide domain expertise and experience. Their criticism/opinions about practices at the hospital etc are generally respected, while they still practice medicine and assist in the most complicated cases.
  • dnautics 7y ago
    The actual physician-ing might be relatively hard to bullshit (but I wouldn't be 100% sure), but how can you be sure they aren't terrible managers? It might even be anti-selected (as it is with science professors)
• deleted 7y ago
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• misterman0 7y ago
  Hear, hear! For the love of Jesus Christ, the bullshitting in our industry must stop! This is my main gripe with our industry and the reason I've been contemplating getting the fuck out of Dodge on, holy shit, so, so many occasions. I've been in it for 25 years+. But, people who are full of shit need to shut the fuckz up. It takes a significant amount of civil courage to take tone in a meeting full of bosses. But if you don't then who do you expect will take tone, stand up and call out bullshit? Are you delegating that responsibility to someone else? Your kids perhaps? Are they the ones who aren't supposed to just ride on the wave of absolute crap that is our ancestors idea of "economy"? Or are you? People who have guts as well as brains, take tone and make a scene. Edit: spellng
  • thanatropism 7y ago
    ESL here. What is "take tone"?
    • misterman0 7y ago
      Sing! Edit: in case anyone thinks I'm trying to sing the gospel of The Christ, then you are wrong. I'm not a Christian. I'm much more in favor of rationality. I'm using the name of The Lord as a kind of "click-bait" if you will. But you didn't realize I as being doubly-sarcastic, so I realize now why I'm being down-voted. Shame on me for trying to be witty.
    • andredz 7y ago
      ESL as well. I think it might have to do with tuning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_tuning) which is usually done before a concert. So it'd be: ready yourself to make a scene.
    • thestoicattack 7y ago
      To take a certain tone with someone means to speak in a certain way -- as in, use a particular tone of voice.
• adamnemecek 7y ago
  Are the fizzbuzzers real? I feel like their existence is somewhat mythological.
  • bigred100 7y ago
    A friend of a friend asked some highly confident guy how to do fizzbuzz in an interview and he failed. It does happen apparently
    • bartread 7y ago
      I'm probably not the friend of a friend you're talking about but I've asked confident, articulate people to solve fizzbuzz and similar toy problems many times, only for them to fail hard. Nowadays I tend to use such problems as pre-screeners in a short telephone interview[1] before inviting candidates to attend a full face to face interview because it saves wasting everybody's time, including the candidate's. Sad but true. [1] We use codeshare.io or, if it's oversubscribed, Google Docs. Massively prefer the former because it includes syntax highlighting and support for many different languages, so it feels much more like a decent code editor. With Google Docs you're using a word processor which is far from ideal for many reasons, including that you feel like you're fighting autocorrect the whole time.
  • eitland 7y ago
    Have read a few descriptions that seem first hand. Have been greeted enthusiastically 10 years ago by the team I was joining because I was a shining example of the kind of candidate they wanted in a see of wannabees (we spoke briefly about design patterns in the interview and I solved a take home problem that included connecting to a database and querying it using JDBC.) While not FizzBuzz the whole thing could be solved in less than an hour and I had a couple of days and could use any resource I wanted. I guess that says something about the problems one can face. That said: More often I've experienced doing good or even perfect interviews etc only to hear nothing back etc so this definitely goes both ways.
  • astura 7y ago
    I've seen people fail fizz buzz firsthand.
• adreamingsoul 7y ago
  The time it takes to build software is my biggest concern right now. I have nearly worked myself into severe states of mental health trying to meet unrealistic deadlines. Who sets these deadlines? I have no idea, but more and more of the engineers around me are leaving for better working environments and being replaced by fresh engineers who are lured in by the salary. Needless to say, I’m eager to work in a healthier and realsitic culture.
• BjoernKW 7y ago
  It's not that simple. There certainly are those who confidently sell something without having any actual real-life experience with the matter at hand. However, another harmful pattern is rampant in the tech industry as well: The one that assumes that technical knowledge is the only thing that's valuable and everything else (sales, marketing, business stuff in general, you name it ...) is just bullshit. This widespread attitude not only tends to relegate those who exhibit it to positions of - well-paid - grunts, who have no say in a product's or company's direction even if they're the ones who create most of the value. It also is the cause of an equally widespread resentment towards less technically inclined people, who from that point of view reap most of the rewards while providing little benefit.
  • ngngngng 7y ago
    It's not even THAT simple. There's a difference between thinking sales and marketing is all bullshit, and thinking that the sales and marketing people you're working with are bullshit. A previous company of mine hired a product manager. I definitely don't think product management and direction is bullshit. But this guy just wrote "synergy" on white boards all day, made us start sizing our tasks, and never gave anyone good ideas or direction. Hearing me complain about this, you might assume that i'm just another engineer that thinks anything but engineering is bullshit.
• shitbull 7y ago
  It could be said that I dumped my last four (four!) jobs due to the extreme bullshit artistry that agile/scrum methodologies engender. That could be said, but it wouldn't be 100% The Truth. Still, it almost feels right to say that. Because I started to feel truly dehumanized each time I found myself deeply mired in a process that revolved around a daily stand-up. I wanted to punch walls, strangle people, rip my hair out and scream in people's faces for all the polite stupidity and phoney baloney lip service we waded through every morning. It was like, hey, let's start the day with complete fiction, and then try to build real progress on that foundation of laffy taffy and silly putty! YAAAYYYYY! Why did I have to stand in a circle and tell lies and listen to lies for 20 minutes? Why did we go around the circle, look each other in the eye, not wink, and then say things that weren't even close to true? I lost respect for most of my co-workers that way. It felt like the worst descriptions of a certain cult, where as you level up, you must, with ever-more convincing conviction, claim to believe in science fiction fairy tales revealed by The Word of a 1950's sci-author. Before agile/scrum, it was safe and reasonable to take two or three weeks to complete a long-running chunk of serious effort that mattered to the success of a project. After agile/scrum, that was no longer true. Daily incremental progress had to be "proven" and if that were not possible... UH OHHHHHHHHHHHH! NOTHING HAPPENS. (but still, uh ohhhhhhhh) And then the fucking beating a dead horse sessions. Running back-to-back meetings (yes, these are called meetings, folks) for planning AND retrospectives. Two hours chopped out of each Friday, having planning for next week, and a retrospective for this past week, or I don't even know what week. Really? Seriously? Two hours locked in a room where nothing happens, even though we have to stand around in a circle and prove something happened yesterday, or justify why it did not. And oh yeah! Backlog grooming. Another hour for that. Where the rubber meets the road on the bullshit artistry, accumulated backlog garbage fires, for all the actual daily tasks like log scraping and urgent bug fixes that actually have to happen or a significant portion of real and necessary business falls flat on its face if neglected. And oh yeah, multiple hours long actual design and planning sessions injected at random any given week, where we would be assembling the true-true goals that might ostensibly take shape next quarter or something. This is where you gain the realization of who the ghosts of Christmas past are. The dead, fired and quit employees who were responsible for all the backlog tickets, long long ago, before time immemorible, frolicking amid the primordial ooze with with prototypical vertebral boney plate exoskeletons and filter feeding mouth parts, must have experienced meeting like these... but where are they now? I'm not going back. I won't work any such sort of job ever again. I won't interview for them. Apply to them. Talk to people. It doesn't matter. I never want to work again, if that's what work looks like now.
• AndrewKemendo 7y ago
  How do you prove someone doesn't know something? It's an impossible task if it's not their job to implement. So it borders on impossible to be an IC and a bullshitter. However if you're a supervisor or manager which I would argue are the majority of bullshitters, and you aren't committing code (or other similar technical work), then how would you prove that they don't know what they are talking about, without getting fired, until it's too late? What happens when the bullshitter has top cover and can't be called out/fired? The standard response to these is "that's a bad place to work so quit." Ok, maybe sometimes. However most people don't have the ability to do that. So they just double duty the work and get the job done. So, I'm curious how do you call out bullshitters when you can't prove they don't know something? Honestly asking cause I'd love to do this a lot but don't know how.
• bksenior 7y ago
  This is a crazy naive take and Id argue almost the opposite. Id say if you want to cut down anti-intellectualism, that might be more of a founded hot take. Start-ups are foundationaly bullshit. It's almost always some person with some type of observation and a relative level of blind faith for an idea or system that MAY work. Worse than that, almost every major breakthrough or improvement ends up looking completely different than the original hypothesis immediately rendering the original confidence as bullshit. We just apply genius historically. In the end startups seem to be a confidence game where a group or person basically need to survive long enough for a point on their series of experiments to work and their bullshit to be "prescient." My observation on tech and engineering is the disdain for bullshit is a clumsy hatred for the uncertain nature of social exchange amongst people. The rules are very different than the absolute predictability of systems like math and logic and that makes people uncomfortable and angry.
  • charlieflowers 7y ago
    Gotta say, you just dropped a lot of insight in that post
• Nursie 7y ago
  The 'Product Managers' who don't know what the product does and the 'Business Analysts' that have no idea about the marketplace and who solipsitically shuffle Jira tickets endlessly...
• anonytrary 7y ago
  As a software engineer with a degree in non-CS STEM, I constantly ask myself if I am just a bullshitter. I can pass technical interviews for the most part and I code for fun, but I can't help but think "the people who work at Google are probably better than me".
  • maze-le 7y ago
    That is called imposter-syndrome, and it basically is the opposite of bullshittery. All of us have insecurities about what they do -- our field is concerned with very abstract concepts and at the end of the day you have produced something of value (lines of code, a build system integration, maintenance on a legacy system), but you cannot touch it, feel it or have any relationship to it other than intellectual satisfaction. This can lead to a valuation problem, where we find it hard to put a value on the work we actually do. We suddenly begin to doubt the whole process and our role in it. Its not unusual in tech, really many of us have the exactly same thoughts. >> "the people who work at [X] are probably better than me" Yes, some of them probably are. And some others are incompetent idiots. But most of them are neither here nor there and good percentage of them are asking themself the very same question (with X = {microsoft, apple, nasa, you name it...}). The fact, that you are able to reflect on yourself, "can pass technical interviews" and "code for fun" is a good sign that you are probably not a bullshitter.
• pagade 7y ago
  Your are the bullshitter in somebody else's story. I mean nobody is 100% bullshitter 100% of the time. How do you know when and about what they are. (I am genuinely interested in knowing)
• mathattack 7y ago
  This can be done one action at a time. Every time someone claimed expertise in something I know, I ask about it. If someone uses a buzzword I don’t know, I ask them to explain it in plain English. And I ask again if they define one buzzword with another. And if they namedrop a mutual friend, I ask the connection their opinion. BS is a cancer. Unless you’re drinking with friends, in which case it’s entertainment.
• dave_sid 7y ago
  Filter out bullshitters from a company my making them take a small basic interview test from each level that they are supposedly leading. “Never heard of fizz buzz? Good bye...”
• kodz4 7y ago
  The problem is not the bullshitters. They are usually a sign of deeper problems that no one more competent wants to deal with. Does Bill Gates want to be President? Nope. What a hassle, too busy, other interests etc etc etc. The higher up you climb no issue is black and white. And the more ambiguous things get in terms of cost to self and everyone else, the less the number of people willing to stick their neck out. Thats when you locate a master bullshitter and invite him into the room with all the best and the brightest present and hand him all power. It shakes everyone up. And sooner or later someone will step up. The older you get the more you play these kind of games to 'nudge' people into taking on thankless responsibilities.
  • xiaolingxiao 7y ago
    "Thats when you locate a master bullshitter and invite him into the room with all the best and the brightest present and hand him all power. It shakes everyone up. And sooner or later someone will step up" Could you explain the social reason for why this is? Is it because everyone else think they're better off sharing on the upside created by the Bullshitter, while not being as exposed to the downside? Do they think they can control the BS artist instead of the other way around?
    • kodz4 7y ago
      Yup it's very much a tradeoff. Things break down all the time. > Is it because everyone else think they're better off sharing on the upside created by the Bullshitter, while not being as exposed to the downside? Some within any group will think this way (and help in propping up and supporting). Some just don't want the job, don't want to deal with more shit, want to work on other things etc etc. All this creates a space for the bullshitter to exist. Whether the bullshitter gets there by his own enterprise or someone puts him there, it creates a tension within the group. Good managers try to channel that towards positive outcomes. It's why they get paid what they do.
• dominotw 7y ago
  > but something needs to be done about these types of people I've been thinking a lot about this. Why doesn't capitalism take care of this. what is the fundamental flaw in capitalism that allows this.
  • haihaibye 7y ago
    The problem is information asymmetry - see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
• sharadov 7y ago
  No more apparent than in the Bay Area. The confidence rattles you, and then you see these guys getting promoted and moving up. Charlatans all of them!
• rramadass 7y ago
  Preach Brother! This has become ubiquitous and the Norm in the Software Industry. People's mindset and expectations have been so programmed that nobody calls out BS; they just accept it and move on using the excuse "everybody does it". Every Engineer in the industry has to play this "game", how much ever he may find it distasteful, if he wants to get ahead in his career. You can see the results everywhere; job ads asking the impossible, resumes filled with skyhigh exaggerations, completely mystifying product presentations, companies with claims which have no bearing to reality etc. It is a vicious cycle and i can see no end in sight.