6 ms·

The Thermocline of Truth (2008)

43 points by N1H1L 5y ago

news_to_me 5y ago
> (NOTE: my use of male pronouns is deliberate; it is almost always male IT engineers who have this unreasonable optimism. Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic, almost to a fault, which is why I prefer them. I just wish they weren’t so hard to find.) I don’t know why, but something about this aside really rubbed me the wrong way.
- msandford 5y ago
  It's the classic "look at the coarsest metric and use it to make some kind of a judgement" that basically everyone does. Not getting eaten by a lion is way, way more valuable than occasionally running away from nothing for no reason so human animals can't help themselves. It's in the firmware or hardware. You have to recognize it's happening in your software and decide to look for better clues to overcome what the firmware is doing. It's the same kind of thing that causes a person who has been robbed to conclude that anyone who matches some kind of obvious characteristics of the person who robbed them to be the same kind of "other" and to diligently avoid them. You can't blame them! They got robbed! That's traumatic. What's too bad is when the person never examines their beliefs for where they're wrong and to try and update their model of the world. Not every female engineer is amazing and not every male one has too much bravado. Not everyone who is wearing the same clothes as the mugger is a mugger. Not everyone who is wearing different clothes is not a mugger. But also life is short and the heuristics we all use every day serve us well enough that to examine every single one would mean you couldn't do much at all with your life. It's too bad but try not to take it personally. We all do it and we rarely know in what ways we are.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    > It's too bad but try not to take it personally. Does this strike you as an odd way to respond to cut and dry sexism? Would this response be as reasonable and forgiving if the genders in the quoted aside were reversed?
    - msandford 5y ago
      It depends on if you're talking about the "oppressed people can't be racist" kind of theory of oppression, or the "the rules are the rules" kind of oppression. Honestly it wasn't written to the person to say "it's totally OK for a person to speak this way" it was more of a "look lots of people are going to rub you the wrong way, here's a way to think about it that involves them being accidentally ignorant rather than purposefully malicious". I'm not saying a person should have to have this attitude and "let everyone get away with it" but I can say that anyone who does have this attitude will probably have a happier personal life. The decision is up to all of us.
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Inviting the question: on which side of the thermocline of truth might you consider yourself located?
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Probably just the blatant sexism. I wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was less competent merely because of my gender. I also wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was hot shit merely because of my gender.
  - lmm 5y ago
    It's not just the blatant sexism but the blatant double-standard sexism. I wouldn't mind working with someone who made a fair assessment of the areas where I would likely be better or worse than average on account of my sex. But getting only the negatives sucks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AlbertCory 5y ago
I enjoyed this, although I don't think the word "thermocline" is really necessary or adds much. Daniel Kahneman wrote about The Planning Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy) in 1979 and it's been studied in great detail. My personal cure (YMMV) is the Prediction Market, where people place bets on the final date (of course, you need to remove any temptation to interfere and make your own bet come true!). Once you realize it's a human failing and we're all subject to it, you get a little more realistic. Maybe.
- xelxebar 5y ago
  I find analogies to physical systems help me generate "non-obvious" questions. What are some ways to break up a physical thermocline? 1. Mixing and turbulent flow between layers; 2. Radiators that transverse layers; 3. Redistribution of heat source. What might these look like when translated into a business "thermocline"? 1. Break up the management hierarchy and distribute responsibility in a homogeneous, egalitarian way; 2. Make sure that at every meeting, no matter the hierarchy level, members from all levels are present; 3. Make management also deal with low-level GitLab tasks on a frequent basis. Whether the above proposals actually work is big question; however, thanks to the physical analogy, the pretty much immediately came to mind. When ideas come cheap, it's easier to keep discarding them until a truly good one comes along.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    Perhaps. Although someone at a company no longer in business told me about an active attempt to fix this problem by doing what you call (1) Mixing and (2) Radiators. There was a goal of August for the software project. In practical terms: top management made a serious effort to ask the engineers when the project would really be done, and without the presence of middle management. The consensus was, overwhelmingly, January. When this was shared among the top managers, they voted to keep the August deadline. Because they were committed to it. If you're guessing that it really finished in January, you must have heard this story before :) The moral is, you can expose them to accurate dates, but if they refuse to hear it, there's nothing you can do.
  - 5y ago
bradleyjg 5y ago
This should have (2008), but is still well worth reading. This was lampshaded in Silicon Valley but I can’t seem to find a clip.
mikewarot 5y ago
>First, the IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics that can measure progress and predict project completion with any reasonable degree of accuracy In order to have automated metrics you would have to have a complete and accurate specification that never changes. Something that doesn't exist. >Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists No, Management tends to demand more than can be delivered, as pressured by sales. >Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic Women aren't as stupid as men, and actually want something approaching work/life balance. You might want to consider older men, who have less testosterone poisoning as an additional source of wisdom. I agree with points 3 and 4. Management that doesn't actually understand how "the sausage is made" will always face a thermocline/impedance mismatch. The effect of a good working relationship with trust in both directions can greatly help address the obstacles it imposes. It might help to offer some education as to how things work at the top, the pressures upper management faces, and how it drives their decision making, to the lower ranks of the org chart.
- newsclues 5y ago
  “ In order to have automated metrics you would have to have a complete and accurate specification that never changes. Something that doesn't exist.” I challenge that assumption. First you automate metrics for the specified work, then have an estimate for changes and give management more data on the choice to make changes.
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    The specified work is the authoring of a program, how would you automate measuring that authorship?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
josh_fyi 5y ago
When all managers suddenly change their "green" report to "red", it is because no one wants to be the first to admit defeat, so they informally coordinate, even with the vaguest of hints, to all do so at once.
PopGreene 5y ago
> ... IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics that can measure progress and predict project completion with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Instead, we tend to rely on seat-of-the-pants (or, less politely, out-of-one’s-butt) estimations by IT engineers or managers that a given subsystem or application is “80% done”... Here was where I started to realize that this was going to be a bit of a hand-wavy ("out-of-one's-butt") argument. Are we talking about tracking progress or estimating? This seems to conflate the two. > Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, ... Really? Optimists? I don't think that word means what you think it means. This "optimism" wouldn't have anything to do with being pressured by management to give more favorable estimates, would it? What makes both estimation and progress tracking difficult or impossible is a lack of good requirements specifications or use cases. I have never worked for a company where anyone took these seriously. Sure, they talked a good line, but never seemed to follow through. There's always an excuse. The thing is, if you don't know what you want and/or can't express it, you're unlikely to get what you want.
- scotty79 5y ago
  > Are we talking about tracking progress or estimating? This seems to conflate the two. Estimating in IT is predicting the future, which is done "out-of-ones-butt". Tracking the progress is supposedly about the present, but it's necessarily linked with predicting the future, because you can't know how far you are if you don't know how much is ahead of you. Without that you can say only nearly useless things like, "I worked on this x hours so far." or "I wrote so many files/lines/functions". > > Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, ... > Really? Optimists? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Really. We are absurdly optimist. Even when we are trying to be reasonably pessimistic with our visions of the future of the project it usually turns out we were unreasonably optimistic. And we have to be optimistic to do our jobs. Every day we are proven wrong by a machine but we need to keep believing that we can get things right to keep working.

43 points by N1H1L 5y ago

> (NOTE: my use of male pronouns is deliberate; it is almost always male IT engineers who have this unreasonable optimism. Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic, almost to a fault, which is why I prefer them. I just wish they weren’t so hard to find.) I don’t know why, but something about this aside really rubbed me the wrong way.

msandford 5y ago
It's the classic "look at the coarsest metric and use it to make some kind of a judgement" that basically everyone does. Not getting eaten by a lion is way, way more valuable than occasionally running away from nothing for no reason so human animals can't help themselves. It's in the firmware or hardware. You have to recognize it's happening in your software and decide to look for better clues to overcome what the firmware is doing. It's the same kind of thing that causes a person who has been robbed to conclude that anyone who matches some kind of obvious characteristics of the person who robbed them to be the same kind of "other" and to diligently avoid them. You can't blame them! They got robbed! That's traumatic. What's too bad is when the person never examines their beliefs for where they're wrong and to try and update their model of the world. Not every female engineer is amazing and not every male one has too much bravado. Not everyone who is wearing the same clothes as the mugger is a mugger. Not everyone who is wearing different clothes is not a mugger. But also life is short and the heuristics we all use every day serve us well enough that to examine every single one would mean you couldn't do much at all with your life. It's too bad but try not to take it personally. We all do it and we rarely know in what ways we are.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > It's too bad but try not to take it personally. Does this strike you as an odd way to respond to cut and dry sexism? Would this response be as reasonable and forgiving if the genders in the quoted aside were reversed?
  - msandford 5y ago
    It depends on if you're talking about the "oppressed people can't be racist" kind of theory of oppression, or the "the rules are the rules" kind of oppression. Honestly it wasn't written to the person to say "it's totally OK for a person to speak this way" it was more of a "look lots of people are going to rub you the wrong way, here's a way to think about it that involves them being accidentally ignorant rather than purposefully malicious". I'm not saying a person should have to have this attitude and "let everyone get away with it" but I can say that anyone who does have this attitude will probably have a happier personal life. The decision is up to all of us.
smitty1e 5y ago
Inviting the question: on which side of the thermocline of truth might you consider yourself located?
oh_sigh 5y ago
Probably just the blatant sexism. I wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was less competent merely because of my gender. I also wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was hot shit merely because of my gender.
- lmm 5y ago
  It's not just the blatant sexism but the blatant double-standard sexism. I wouldn't mind working with someone who made a fair assessment of the areas where I would likely be better or worse than average on account of my sex. But getting only the negatives sucks.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

AlbertCory 5y ago

I enjoyed this, although I don't think the word "thermocline" is really necessary or adds much. Daniel Kahneman wrote about The Planning Fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy) in 1979 and it's been studied in great detail. My personal cure (YMMV) is the Prediction Market, where people place bets on the final date (of course, you need to remove any temptation to interfere and make your own bet come true!). Once you realize it's a human failing and we're all subject to it, you get a little more realistic. Maybe.

xelxebar 5y ago
I find analogies to physical systems help me generate "non-obvious" questions. What are some ways to break up a physical thermocline? 1. Mixing and turbulent flow between layers; 2. Radiators that transverse layers; 3. Redistribution of heat source. What might these look like when translated into a business "thermocline"? 1. Break up the management hierarchy and distribute responsibility in a homogeneous, egalitarian way; 2. Make sure that at every meeting, no matter the hierarchy level, members from all levels are present; 3. Make management also deal with low-level GitLab tasks on a frequent basis. Whether the above proposals actually work is big question; however, thanks to the physical analogy, the pretty much immediately came to mind. When ideas come cheap, it's easier to keep discarding them until a truly good one comes along.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  Perhaps. Although someone at a company no longer in business told me about an active attempt to fix this problem by doing what you call (1) Mixing and (2) Radiators. There was a goal of August for the software project. In practical terms: top management made a serious effort to ask the engineers when the project would really be done, and without the presence of middle management. The consensus was, overwhelmingly, January. When this was shared among the top managers, they voted to keep the August deadline. Because they were committed to it. If you're guessing that it really finished in January, you must have heard this story before :) The moral is, you can expose them to accurate dates, but if they refuse to hear it, there's nothing you can do.
- 5y ago

bradleyjg 5y ago

This should have (2008), but is still well worth reading. This was lampshaded in Silicon Valley but I can’t seem to find a clip.

mikewarot 5y ago

>First, the IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics that can measure progress and predict project completion with any reasonable degree of accuracy In order to have automated metrics you would have to have a complete and accurate specification that never changes. Something that doesn't exist. >Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists No, Management tends to demand more than can be delivered, as pressured by sales. >Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic Women aren't as stupid as men, and actually want something approaching work/life balance. You might want to consider older men, who have less testosterone poisoning as an additional source of wisdom. I agree with points 3 and 4. Management that doesn't actually understand how "the sausage is made" will always face a thermocline/impedance mismatch. The effect of a good working relationship with trust in both directions can greatly help address the obstacles it imposes. It might help to offer some education as to how things work at the top, the pressures upper management faces, and how it drives their decision making, to the lower ranks of the org chart.

newsclues 5y ago
“ In order to have automated metrics you would have to have a complete and accurate specification that never changes. Something that doesn't exist.” I challenge that assumption. First you automate metrics for the specified work, then have an estimate for changes and give management more data on the choice to make changes.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  The specified work is the authoring of a program, how would you automate measuring that authorship?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

josh_fyi 5y ago

When all managers suddenly change their "green" report to "red", it is because no one wants to be the first to admit defeat, so they informally coordinate, even with the vaguest of hints, to all do so at once.

PopGreene 5y ago

> ... IT software development profession largely lacks — or fails to put into place — automated, objective and repeatable metrics that can measure progress and predict project completion with any reasonable degree of accuracy. Instead, we tend to rely on seat-of-the-pants (or, less politely, out-of-one’s-butt) estimations by IT engineers or managers that a given subsystem or application is “80% done”... Here was where I started to realize that this was going to be a bit of a hand-wavy ("out-of-one's-butt") argument. Are we talking about tracking progress or estimating? This seems to conflate the two. > Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, ... Really? Optimists? I don't think that word means what you think it means. This "optimism" wouldn't have anything to do with being pressured by management to give more favorable estimates, would it? What makes both estimation and progress tracking difficult or impossible is a lack of good requirements specifications or use cases. I have never worked for a company where anyone took these seriously. Sure, they talked a good line, but never seemed to follow through. There's always an excuse. The thing is, if you don't know what you want and/or can't express it, you're unlikely to get what you want.

scotty79 5y ago
> Are we talking about tracking progress or estimating? This seems to conflate the two. Estimating in IT is predicting the future, which is done "out-of-ones-butt". Tracking the progress is supposedly about the present, but it's necessarily linked with predicting the future, because you can't know how far you are if you don't know how much is ahead of you. Without that you can say only nearly useless things like, "I worked on this x hours so far." or "I wrote so many files/lines/functions". > > Second, IT engineers by nature tend to be optimists, ... > Really? Optimists? I don't think that word means what you think it means. Really. We are absurdly optimist. Even when we are trying to be reasonably pessimistic with our visions of the future of the project it usually turns out we were unreasonably optimistic. And we have to be optimistic to do our jobs. Every day we are proven wrong by a machine but we need to keep believing that we can get things right to keep working.