Oh, I glossed over that in my response. I've had people at the C-level admit that they don't care about ethics to me, and I especially see startup CEOs lie a lot, or otherwise be so self-deluded to make sales easier that it's hard to tell if they know they're lying.
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
> they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status
That's not preferring good software to bad software, though. In order for a value to be meaningful when expressed, it has to result in some kind of trade off. If you value honesty over safety but never are put in a situation where you have to choose between honesty and safety, then that value is fairly meaningless.
That's fair. I overstated my point a bit -- if a project was on schedule and it could be delayed by one day to improve something nebulous, many would agree. It's just that the tradeoffs are never that small, so you never actually see it happen, i.e, the preference is extremely minor.
Just wanted to pop in and say that I think Sean is absolutely right here. I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
However, I think we've got some tactical disagreements on how to actually make society a better place. Namely, I think Sean is right if you have to remain an employee, but many people just don't have to do that, so it feels a bit like a great guide on how to win soccer while hopping on one leg. Just use two legs!
My own experience, especially over the last year, has been telling me that being positioned as an employee at most companies means you're largely irrelevant, i.e, you should adopt new positioning (e.g, become a third-party consultant like me) or find a place that's already running nearly perfectly. I can't imagine going back to a full-time job unless I was given a CTO/CEO or board role, where I could again operate with some autonomy... and I suspect at many of the worst places, even these roles can't do much.
Also Sean, if you're reading this, we'll get coffee together before March or die trying.
> I've tried the ultra-cynical view at workplaces, and would have had better results with some "idealism", which he rightly notes in his form is just a more effectively action atop a base of clear-eyed cynicism.
Cynics feel smart but optimists win.
You have to be at least a little optimistic, sometimes even naive, to achieve unlikely outcomes. Otherwise you’ll never put in enough oomph to get lucky.
That's not been my experience. Optimists also tend to assume the best motivations behind the actions of others, and that will nearly always bite you in the ass in any sizeable organization.
I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
I think we need to be realistic on order to be successful, and neither ultra-cynicism nor optimism fits the bill.
I would suggest that a healthy, reasonable amount of cynicism is a part of being realistic about how the world works.
>I've been the ultra-cynic before, and agree that doesn't work either. People don't like working with you, and don't trust you.
Is the issue being that one isn't being cynical enough? If you are very cynical about how things will turn out, and share that with others who don't appreciate it (even if you are right), then you are being optimistic in thinking it will change things. Controlling one's displays to others to appear as whatever gets one their best outcome is being even more cynical, to the point of abandoning any attempts at open honest relationships, but it likely works the best if one can pull it off.
Though that might be a very big if, and getting caught faking this likely is worse. Then again, is forcing oneself to adopt optimism just an attempt to do this indirectly, a sort of 'fool yourself so you can better fool others' approach when more direct manipulation doesn't work, given that drive for the optimism is to get better outcomes?
Blind optimism is silly. But time and again we’ve shown that tit-for-tat is the best strategy in repeated games.
Start optimistic. Stop if it doesn’t work. In the long-term you don’t need to win every iteration, just enough for a positive expected value. And make sure you don’t get wiped out in any single iteration.
The weeks are short but the decades are long and the industry is smaller than you’d think :)
Is that really how most people would define optimism these days? I know that's what it meant in Voltaire's time, but something tells me that if you asked modern optimist whether they thought we lived in the best of all possible worlds, a majority of them would either say no or that they don't know.
It would seem if we think Voltaire was wrong, then the difference between pessimists and “modern” optimists is not fundamental but merely a matter of degree.
100% agree. Cynics can be always be right about the past, but optimists are often right about the future, because they are the ones actually building it.
Are you certain about which way the arrow of causality points there? Your friend might have more reason to be optimistic because he is financially secure.
It's pretty obvious how an insufficiently cynical person could end up badly off - they could send all that money to that deposed prince in Nigeria, or whatever.
But the right optimism in the right situation can really pay off. Imagine you're pitching your non-technical carmaker CEO on a proposal to make a new pickup truck, and the CEO asks if you can make the entire thing with 0.1mm accuracy.
If you say "Yes sir, in fact many parts will be even more accurate than that" your project gets funded.
If you say "No, thermal expansion alone makes that impossible, it's also unnecessary" you're gambling on him respecting your straight-talking and technical chops.
Cynical take - if you know you're lying, that's not optimism, that's cynical manipulation.
A lot of people missing that cynicism isn't the same as sneering grumpiness.
You can be perfectly pleasant and charming while being utterly cynical about how you approach professional relationships.
This is a problem with at least two axes. The cynicism part relies on accurately calibrating the distance between official narratives and reality.
If you're a pessimist, you overshoot. An optimist undershoots. A realist gets it more or less right.
But if the distance is huge, that automatically makes the realist a cynic, because the reality is a lie, and in most orgs failing to take false narratives at face value is considered dissidence.
The strategic part depends on how you handle that. You can be sneering and negative, you can play the game with a fake smile and an eye for opportunity, or you can aim for neutrality and a certain amount of distance.
Sneering negativity is usually the least effective option, even when it's the most honest.
A realist in a functional organisation won't be cynical at all.
> Cynical take - if you know you're lying, that's not optimism, that's cynical manipulation.
Cynicaler take: That's how some companies fill their management with people who don't know when they're lying.
A person who knows how much 5m of steel expands with a 30°C temperature swing has to say "No" to the boss. A person who doesn't know that, but does know the production line uses a $250,000 Leica laser tracker thingummy that's real accurate can say "Yes Sir" and find themselves in charge of a funded project.
That's all fake. LinkedIn is for sales and recruiting. If you see something there - a post, anything - it's meant to sell something. It's all as fake as the contents of an ad break.
It's important to note that many of those people aren't winning. What you're witnessing is the marketing equivalent of what random government software engineers produce. A good number of the people on HN would be trivially outearning those nerds
You won’t have happy kids and a good family life, if you don’t think it’s possible. Same as you won’t make a cool open-source library, if you aren’t optimistic (or naive) enough to go work on that.
And if you keep saying everything is impossible a huge drag extremely worthless and why even bother trying, you won’t get the fun projects at work.
I'd have to know what your work is worth; however, the past half a decade has brought enormous inflation that people still haven't factored into their expectations. Wait until commodities prices rise soon and then we'll see a shift in workplace attitudes towards salaries. The 401k ponzi scheme has to end sometime.
I've written about getting out of some giga-depression a few years ago, but having a good therapist was massive. Working out kept me busy and mitigated symptoms, but I don't think I would have improved without a strong psychologist.
Hope that helps a little bit. It gets better sometimes!
If you are willing, can you share a link to any public writing? I'm surprised that we don't see more blog posts shared in HN about people's stuggle with mental health. You definitely see HN posts about it, but I don't see so much blog post sharing.
I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.
Yeah, I run into this a lot too, hah. It's depressing but also pretty funny when you've got enough distance from it. My favorite was an ex-girlfriend working in HR interviewed a candidate with 15 years of experience, and was told to ask him to solve FizzBuzz in a language of his choice.
(This is obviously a silly test for various reasons, but she was following orders.)
She called me later that day because the guy couldn't do it, so he instead blew the fuck up at HR and accused them of ambushing him with a super complex interview question. From his reaction, she thought that the company had tricked her into making totally unreasonable demands of someone who hasn't had a month to prepare.
God knows what the hell that guy did at his previous role.
PS: I have laughed every time I've seen your username for the past year, and can't remember if I've told you this before.
Wow, I didn't buy this because it seemed a bit grim for my tastes, but it looked very impressive when I came across it a few months ago. Wild that it's one person's passion project.
Someone told me to read Meadows over a year ago, and I can no longer remember who, and to make it worse it slipped off my radar. I'm filled with regret now because they appear to be a concise and insightful thinker, or at least an effective proliferative of good ideas.
No reason to regret, still time to read her works. That essay is also a chapter in her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer (publish posthumously), and more essays are on that site.
This is a good take. In the consulting context, I've quickly realized that most problems at a business can be broken down into "this will destroy the project on its own" and "this is an annoyance to a good engineer". Language choice is basically always in the latter category, whereas poor management or one egotist is frequently in the former.
Like, my team doesn't know anything about Java, but we COULD ship in Java if forced to. We can't ship if the feedback loop is a 30-minute CI pipeline because there is no way to have a local dev environment.
My team ships with a multi-hour CI pipeline that works 50% of the time and effectively zero local development. It's awful in almost every way developer experience-wise, but rock bottom is deeper than you think!
I had local development in a previous job, but you had to start a whole Kubernetes cluster. No unit tests, but a whole suite of e2e tests. And forget about debuggers as it was all microservices.
When using Java or .NET, it is possible to plug debuggers into microservices, but that needs to be taken into account when designing their Dockerfiles.
My team reimplemented a stripped down binary of what our primary service does just so we could run it on our local machines. Otherwise it would take up well over 100GB of RAM. Iteration was a lot more annoying before we did that :)
I think Sean is right that, in the abstract, they prefer good software to bad software, but they won't make any sacrifices if those sacrifices require losing money or status. It's the same "do your what your manager wants" playbook, but run up to board level.
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