Re:Good engineers make terrible leaders
by AstralStorm on Monday December 11, 2017 @02:40AM
(#15895680)
1. You can simulate human systems too in big enough numbers. Guess what half of marketing is. Guess what crowd engineering is. Or economics.
2. Humans in general also behave predictably, though not rationally.
Human engineering is surprisingly quite similar to debugging native crashes, but not, say civic engineering or software design. It is also similar to art, with its rule governed creativity.
3. Most engineers promoted into leaders were not great engineers, and especially not great systems engineers. Peter principle is hard at work here. Not even good managers.
4. Many of the problems posed to managers are completely ill-posed (heck, not even amenable to satisficing) and likely not possible to solve properly.
5. There is a difference between a leader and a manager. One does not necessarily excel at the other's job either.
6. It's a terrible mistake to not apply engineering methods to society. Author has it completely backwards. The problem is almost always not the method, but optimization algorithm and the metric used.
Author presupposes changes that are immeasurable. Well, how does he know about them then? Guesses?
7. The standard solution to an open optimization problem is to use powerful methods for analysing infinite impulse response systems and nonlinear systems. And multivariate analysis. Since these are hard, they are often glossed over and preference is given to simpler ones.
8. Author provides no good concrete examples. Only suppositions.
9. Uses correlation with IQ ignoring the fact that social and mental problems are more pronounced at the extremes and it is a well known fact, this reversing causation.
(Consider how sane you have to be to explain the obvious thing time and again.)
10. The unsaid rule about leadership is that you're not a good leader when you don't get elected for the next term or people you lead start to resent you. Even if you can convince them. The thing about convincing people, it never works in the long term because it does not solve any cause.
11. Many people touted as great leaders are actually pretty shielded from consequences and also employ or employed armies of lower rank leaders and managers.
2. Humans in general also behave predictably, though not rationally. Human engineering is surprisingly quite similar to debugging native crashes, but not, say civic engineering or software design. It is also similar to art, with its rule governed creativity.
3. Most engineers promoted into leaders were not great engineers, and especially not great systems engineers. Peter principle is hard at work here. Not even good managers.
4. Many of the problems posed to managers are completely ill-posed (heck, not even amenable to satisficing) and likely not possible to solve properly.
5. There is a difference between a leader and a manager. One does not necessarily excel at the other's job either.
6. It's a terrible mistake to not apply engineering methods to society. Author has it completely backwards. The problem is almost always not the method, but optimization algorithm and the metric used. Author presupposes changes that are immeasurable. Well, how does he know about them then? Guesses?
7. The standard solution to an open optimization problem is to use powerful methods for analysing infinite impulse response systems and nonlinear systems. And multivariate analysis. Since these are hard, they are often glossed over and preference is given to simpler ones.
8. Author provides no good concrete examples. Only suppositions.
9. Uses correlation with IQ ignoring the fact that social and mental problems are more pronounced at the extremes and it is a well known fact, this reversing causation. (Consider how sane you have to be to explain the obvious thing time and again.)
10. The unsaid rule about leadership is that you're not a good leader when you don't get elected for the next term or people you lead start to resent you. Even if you can convince them. The thing about convincing people, it never works in the long term because it does not solve any cause.
11. Many people touted as great leaders are actually pretty shielded from consequences and also employ or employed armies of lower rank leaders and managers.