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Business needs that. Everyone jumped on the data-driven train (how rigorous was the information that lead them to do that? LOL) but it’s top-to-bottom bullshit.

Business needs that. Everyone jumped on the data-driven train (how rigorous was the information that lead them to do that? LOL) but it’s top-to-bottom bullshit. We have almost no clue how to measure management efficacy, for instance, and the methods we do have are too fiddly and require large sample sizes in just the right circumstances, so nobody but academics even try. It’s like that for almost everything. You look at the data gathering behind and analysis methods for the median strategy PowerPoint and it’s just gibberish, completely useless nonsense, and it doesn’t exactly take a trained & practicing scientist to tell, but everyone who can spot these things and is on the management track knows they’re not supposed to point that out. It’s all a big, weird game of pretend.

adamc 2y ago
I don't agree at all. This is the McNamara fallacy applied to software. You don't have to measure management efficacy. When you call for rewriting project X in technology Y, this is, at a first approximation, just saying: What reasons do we have for thinking this will make a difference? What evidence exists to support such contentions? You don't need to be able to perfectly measure things to have evidence. Evidence might be "We used Y in this other project because <it was good in some way>, and the engineers seem to be able to make changes faster: here's our data." Or "Technology Y is better at <some feature> because it <has more mature libraries, or a better approach to concurrency, or whatever>, so we think it will benefit us." You don't have to be able to measure everything perfectly to make better decisions.
- vundercind 2y ago
  I agree! The current approach needs “science-based management” because that’s what it’s play-acting at—that’s what it would take to do the thing they’re claiming to do. I think it’d be much better to admit that’s far too expensive and/or nearly impossible, plus probably not something most executives are interested in doing anyway, and back off the whole hyper-“legibility” (bad-)data-based-everything notion. It’s an expensive drag mostly delivering bullshit.
  - adamc 2y ago
    You're responding to a different end of the scale. Lots of shops are doing nothing, and that is not the right answer either. You can evaluate the data that exists and do a better job than they are doing.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      Sure, I’ve also seen smaller businesses just totally failing to do anything with data they already have, that probably is decent. Both problems may be connected by a fundamental failure to appreciate scientific and statistical methods at the level that most high school graduates have been exposed to. There’re narrow areas of intense competition (though not whole sectors—pockets here and there) keeping everyone really on their A-game I suppose (I’ve not seen it, and I’ve seen some places one might expect it) and then there’s… everything else, where it’s all a clown show of guesswork and lots of energy and money spent pretending. It’s a miracle anything works.

adamc 2y ago

I don't agree at all. This is the McNamara fallacy applied to software. You don't have to measure management efficacy. When you call for rewriting project X in technology Y, this is, at a first approximation, just saying: What reasons do we have for thinking this will make a difference? What evidence exists to support such contentions? You don't need to be able to perfectly measure things to have evidence. Evidence might be "We used Y in this other project because <it was good in some way>, and the engineers seem to be able to make changes faster: here's our data." Or "Technology Y is better at <some feature> because it <has more mature libraries, or a better approach to concurrency, or whatever>, so we think it will benefit us." You don't have to be able to measure everything perfectly to make better decisions.

vundercind 2y ago
I agree! The current approach needs “science-based management” because that’s what it’s play-acting at—that’s what it would take to do the thing they’re claiming to do. I think it’d be much better to admit that’s far too expensive and/or nearly impossible, plus probably not something most executives are interested in doing anyway, and back off the whole hyper-“legibility” (bad-)data-based-everything notion. It’s an expensive drag mostly delivering bullshit.
- adamc 2y ago
  You're responding to a different end of the scale. Lots of shops are doing nothing, and that is not the right answer either. You can evaluate the data that exists and do a better job than they are doing.
  - vundercind 2y ago
    Sure, I’ve also seen smaller businesses just totally failing to do anything with data they already have, that probably is decent. Both problems may be connected by a fundamental failure to appreciate scientific and statistical methods at the level that most high school graduates have been exposed to. There’re narrow areas of intense competition (though not whole sectors—pockets here and there) keeping everyone really on their A-game I suppose (I’ve not seen it, and I’ve seen some places one might expect it) and then there’s… everything else, where it’s all a clown show of guesswork and lots of energy and money spent pretending. It’s a miracle anything works.