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> Obviously the above examples are exaggerated hyperboles and reality is somewhere in the middle. Are they? Is it? I'm starting to think this actually descri
by d23 5y ago
> Obviously the above examples are exaggerated hyperboles and reality is somewhere in the middle.
Are they? Is it?
I'm starting to think this actually describes most of professional accomplishment and career, at least in software. People can't see negative space, so to speak, and they don't bother to imagine it.
Write or debug something in a fraction of a time another engineer would be able to? Well, we can't observe both universes, so it must have just been easy. Make something super stable and easily understandable that doesn't require any attention or maintenance and becomes crucial to a company's success? Without noise, people will just forget about it or assume it was straightforward.
The space of things that doesn't happen is infinitely bigger than the outcome we end up seeing. This makes a lot of our judgments completely off base.
- mbrodersen 5y agoAgree. The cynical optimum solution seems to be to artificially create drama by exaggerating the difficulties, always looking busy, and solving the problem way ahead of schedule but only deliver close to last minute while telling everybody how hard the team worked to save the day. And then convince non-tech management that you need a bigger budget/more people to handle future projects because obviously what you are doing is super hard and we can’t rely on heroic sacrifices forever.
- soco 5y agoAs a side effect this will make you also super reliable in front of the management, always delivering when promised. SO if you don't exaggerate with your requests, it might be even a win-win situation.
- deterministic 5y agoYep. A friend of mine said that he used to work for a company where team A always multiplied their schedules by 3, and team B worked as fast as possible to deliver. The result was that management loved team A because they always delivered on time, and considered team B to be unreliable/not to be trusted/less competent than team B. The reality of course is that the two teams were equally competent. It’s all about how you handle management expectations.