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> you get hired for your proven ability to (…) No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…) The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everyt

• dannyw 9mo ago
  Your comment and the article expanded my world view a little bit. Thank you.
• gnfargbl 9mo ago
  In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all. I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.
  • rustystump 9mo ago
    I have met armies of julius at all levels. Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you. It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      80% of people you meet are communicating to your customers that the server doesn't have an IP address for security reasons?
      • moralestapia 9mo ago
        Julius is a metaphor for a specific type of person who is ignorant and useless but has mastered the way to appear otherwise. If you think this was about IP addresses, well ...
      • Aeolun 9mo ago
        80% of the people are saying that this is highly complex software. We should not expect to serve more than 4 requests per second without a full kubernetes cluster backed by 27 pods, a cloud spanner database, and 200k lines of code. I present, our contact form.
    • ptero 9mo ago
      Humans are social animals and good social skills is a major benefit almost everywhere, including at work. This does not make most people juliuses.
      • rustystump 9mo ago
        Hi julius! I kid and dont speak as if i am not a julius. Most people are in it for money for a house car family etc. they dont care about the job in so much as means to an end. That is julius but he took it further
        • zem 9mo ago
          that is not what makes a julius though. there are lots of good, competent workers who don't really give a damn about the job, and are just in it for the money, but they know their stuff and are genuinely working and delivering value for the money they are given while they are on the clock. what a julius dials up to eleven is the oft-heard dictum "fake it till you make it", only they are so good at faking it that it becomes their entire thing, not just a way to stay under the radar while they learn the job.
    • JackFr 9mo ago
      > The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. And generational wealth and serious political power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Fitzgerald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr.
      • rustystump 9mo ago
        Read some of the father’s quotes. He literally sent his kids out to marry into richer and more powerful families.
    • closewith 9mo ago
      > Id say 80% of people are julius and if u dont think so then i have some news for you. > Industry is no different. Based on these comments, maybe some self-reflection is in order, as it seems from the 80% comment that what you mean is that 80% of people are able to adequately communicate.
      • rustystump 9mo ago
        Have i been the julius this while time? What a twist.
    • nuancebydefault 9mo ago
      That number feels off by a lot to me. I think i can say i'm quite good at socializing, quite above average when comparing to people I meet and work with. I'd rate my engineering skills about average level and i have a firm dislike of fraud and of people acting to be better/smarter/faster than they really are. In my career I've come across managers of the julius type, as well of the narcissistic type, even a sociopath. I would estimate 10 to 20 percent of people are of the Julius type.
      • rustystump 9mo ago
        It was a subtle ref to the 80/20 rule in that most people likely oscillate between the julius and the useful. Some of that 80% are full time julius for sure.
    • tracerbulletx 9mo ago
      And yet this thread is completely full of Frank Grimes.
    • shabatar 9mo ago
      The question is how does one become julius
      • FartyMcFarter 9mo ago
        Incompetence + luck + social skills.
  • wolfi1 9mo ago
    oh man, I have met several Juliuses. one of them was my boss till he made an error as similar to the one the original Julius made, but unfortunately too late I had to leave the company earlier he made my life hell. now he is at another company, as long as he is at this company I won't apply there, if they hire him they have no place for me
  • coldtea 9mo ago
    No end of Juliuses. And they're not even the worst type you can meet at a software company.
    • rozap 9mo ago
      There are so many. I think if you haven't met a Julius, chances are you are Julius..
      • elbear 9mo ago
        I wonder, how does a Julius perceive another Julius, as another competent worker? What about a non-Julius then?
        • rozap 9mo ago
          I've seen it rationalized by saying you should be moving jobs every year or so, because if you're not doing that, then you're not growing. I've always thought of this as a sort of Julius coping mechanism. On some level, I think a Julius views a non-Julius as a stagnant old gray beard who rejects the "growth mindset". To be clear: I've never seen people who follow this strategy contribute anything of value, and it's the biggest red flag on a resume. You learn and grow more by seeing things through.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
• alpineman 9mo ago
  Everything is perception though. You are looking at this with your own perception, biases, and heuristics just like everyone else. There is no 'right' way to hire.
• skeledrew 9mo ago
  > perceived ability In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • PurpleRamen 9mo ago
    Yet, people are still asking for the usability of OpenClaw outside of marketing. It's a bit unclear how much of a "killer app" it really is, and how much is just burning money for the lulz and Bot RP. I personally also got the impression many people had their first AI-gateway experience with OpenClaw, and don't understand that those abilities have been around for a while now, but is located in the expensive LLMs which OpenClaw is using, not in OpenClaw itself. I've seen people thinking that OpenClaw is actually the AI.
    • sho_hn 9mo ago
      Doesn't really matter. As always it's integration that makes a product. Talking to bots on Telegram isn't new. Running agentic loops isn't new. Giving AI credentials and having it interface with APIs isn't new. Triggering AI jobs from external event queues isn't new. Parking state between AI jobs in temp files isn't new. Putting all together in one product and marketing it to the right audience? New.
      • PurpleRamen 9mo ago
        But novelty doesn't make a killer app. When outside of marketing and gateway-experience, there are still that many open questions, then maybe it's a valid claim to call it perception instead of substance. At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.
• raverbashing 9mo ago
  Talk about going all the way to write the story and seeing the point go by Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels
  • Balinares 9mo ago
    Nah. Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses. Because there will be other disastrous consequences to their bad decision making processes.
    • raverbashing 9mo ago
      > Avoid companies that can't see through the Juliuses. Good luck with that
• eager_learner 9mo ago
  to--> latexr: Thank you for the link to Polum's essay in juliusosis. It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. Probably because modern schooling encourages this. I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.
  • josteink 9mo ago
    > It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug. I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction. A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works. It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility. The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved. If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not. Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)
    • latexr 9mo ago
      > I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug. You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little. There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.
• Balinares 9mo ago
  Oh, Julius. Haven't we all met a Julius. Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent. We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load. The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server. That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO. Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first. The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually. So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years. So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being. This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present. A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well. Our eyes met. And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."
  • crashprone 9mo ago
    This story made my day, thanks!
• fsniper 9mo ago
  I haven't seen that before. But it was really hard get to the end. Not because it's bad written or so, on the contrary is a very good piece. However the feeling is unfathomable. I hate Julius'es. More so I hate the managers blinded by Julius'es.
• PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
  Great article until the end when they talked about AI.
• Xmd5a 9mo ago
  > Pour celleux qui ne connaissent pas l’informatique https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cites-2020-2-page-137?lang=fr https://shs.cairn.info/revue-cites-2020-2-page-137?lang=fr
• 3form 9mo ago
  How about none of the above, but hired because of wanting OpenClaw?
  • bjt 9mo ago
    There's OpenClaw the codebase, and there's OpenClaw the community. They could build the same program very easily (as evidenced by the number of clones out there already). That part's not worth paying much for. But redirecting the whole enthusiast community around it? That's worth a lot.
    • 3form 9mo ago
      Exactly. My point is that it might not be about the guy.
• chungus 9mo ago
  My imposter syndrome is essentially fear of being julius.
  • Rooster61 9mo ago
    90% of software engineers have a fear of being Julius
• quietbritishjim 9mo ago
  I think you're right but you've been a bit pedantic about the parent comment. They sloppily said that delivering business value gets you hired, when in reality the appearance of that may do. But I think we all understood their main thrust was to disagree with the comment before them about coding ability, and the point is that this doesn't always correlate with business value. I did enjoy your link though.
• nickzelei 9mo ago
  Wow, that blog post really gave me pause and has stuck in my head for the last hour or so.
• cekanoni 9mo ago
  This is if not the best article i have read recently. Julius ...
• LoganDark 9mo ago
  Julius sounds like a sociopath. Sociopaths have no empathy/morals, so they can confidently lie all day and still be perfectly fulfilled; and some of them can be very excellent at social manipulation. This level of confidence in all things, including complete bullshitting, and constantly climbing the corporate ladder for huge payoffs, is not too uncommon among them. IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.
• mrugge 9mo ago
  The world is full of Juliuses. And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. Worth considering this before dismissing someone as yet another Julius. Oh and everything doesn't suck.
  • latexr 9mo ago
    > And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual. > Oh and everything doesn't suck. I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.
• johnthescott 9mo ago
  ask to view their code. any trivial detail about their code should be answered quickly and coherently, assuming they wrote the code. in a startup give me unruly pirates over obedient sailors (sj).
• skrlet13 8mo ago
  Julius seems like a inept IT worker, but well-meaning person. Someone who would cheer you up to help. (gen)AI is not even a person. And you have to pay for it, in some way