On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by geofft on Monday August 07, 2017 @02:02PM (#14949657)

I have read the memo, and this seems like an accurate summary. It's phrased in words that sound reasonable, but the ideas aren't reasoned, and it's a particularly common trick to use reasonable words to express unreasoned ideas to fool those who only skim a text.

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by AnimalMuppet on Monday August 07, 2017 @08:16PM (#14952379)

See, that's kind of the problem right there. You define the ideas to be "unreasoned", and therefore any presentation of those ideas is unacceptable, no matter how stated.

Can you state why you find the ideas unreasonable, without some variant of "all right-thinking people know", and without misrepresenting the ideas?

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by geofft on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @08:40AM (#14957156)

Sure. See this comment I just made in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14956998

The trouble with avoiding "all right-thinking people know" is that I have no idea how to find a solid citation for the claim that, say, software engineering is at least as much about people as things. It's a thing you will find anyone senior who's good at their job to agree with. Would you accept books by experienced software engineers as evidence of this point?

Once you grant that point, much of the argument falls apart, as it's clear he's arguing about very junior-level coding and not software engineering as a whole.

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by jblow on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @01:06PM (#14959903)

I am senior at my job and I disagree with that assertion. People skills are indeed helpful and a good benefit, but they are nowhere near primary. Consider the following two people:

(A) Understands people hardly at all, is constantly confused by hem, but understands computers very well

(B) Understands computers hardly at all, is constantly confused by them, but understands people very well

Which of these two candidates is going to be able to design and build a complex software product?

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Re:On managing outrage in Silicon Valley by geofft on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @05:38PM (#14973923)

B, without question! You have junior people to get unconfused by computers and tell you what they're capable of. You have a wealth of existing open-source libraries, protocol designs, whitepapers about private products, etc. You need to understand what the documentation of those products are, that is, what humans are claiming about those components and what humans have successfully done with them. You don't need to be able to tell a double from a lambda to design and lead a team building a complex software product.

Candidate A is going to build a technically impressive product, sure, but we have no idea whether it's what the customer wanted. Candidate A will be a fantastic research scientist or lone-wolf open source hacker, but not a product builder.

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