Yes.

Besides “N”, another indicator you alluded to is the degree to which the aggrieved person is willing to take any responsibility for the outcome.

Sometimes gifted people can negotiate problems with a nervous college dean or engineering manager, so that their solution gets adopted. These problems exist in the world, and successful engineers will hopefully learn to cope with them.

Not to mention the unrecognized genius trope. In more familiar terms, the “I could do that in a weekend” guy (https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/amp/)

Ironically Stack Overflow is one of the best-functioning sites I know of. Community issues, sure, but the pages load really quickly and the UI highlights exactly what it should.

But then there are some big sites which truly suck: massive load time and basic UI issues. Like outdated government/university sites, job application sites, Kroger’s online store (https://joshstrange.com/2024/02/11/krogers-digital-struggle/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39345309). And I know some of these organizations suffer from inadequate funding, legacy systems, and/or compliance rules which make their sites’ issues legitimate, and I’m certain no developer could recreate them in a weekend. But I’m also convinced many of them have issues because of carelessness and/or inefficiency, and a few may be actively trying to emulate bad UX (probably to deter people from using them).

I think both sides are true. On the one hand, dysfunction exists in all organizations. On the other hand, it takes effort to maintain a high functioning organization and most people don’t want to put in the real hard work. Not only are most people resistant to change, but the gratitude/reward probably won’t be there. It’s far easier to complain and wallow in a stuck situation than to sit through the discomfort of pushing for change. Schools, non-profits, government programs, corporations, they all experience it. While I can’t say I support this way of life, I can definitely understand why it exists.

> gratitude/reward probably won’t be there. It’s far easier to complain and wallow in a stuck situation than to sit through the discomfort of pushing for change.

That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad management.

“managing” their workspace and surroundings is the jobs of every senior person in a workplace. Having a line manager that cares and is good at their job helps, but if technical folks believe they can just care about the technical part of a job, they’re setting themselves up for failure and frustration. Getting a solution adopted needs much more than technical excellence, it needs communication, an eye for human factors, an idea of costs and tradeoffs.

Complaining about “bad management” is a symptom of a lack of awareness. There’s a lot of bad management, but there’s about as many technical people that just ignore all of those non-technical factors and then constantly complain that their solutions never make it anywhere.

In my eyes there is a good deal of victim blaming in that view. Time and again engineers pushing for changes, ignoring borders of teams or (sub-)orgs and the management hierarchy are met with highly toxic reactions, usually by managers who are seeing some kind of dangerous insubordination.

I’m a tech person by trade and spent more than a decade in operations - the ones that need to deal with the results of it all. And I can tell you that I’ve met a fair share of developers and ops people that would just ignore all constraints, to the point of blaming management that they required developers (and ops folks) to implement legal requirements. as an example: I’ve worked in an environment that managed sensitive (and legally privileged) data and people would rather circumvent security measures that made their work harder than take security up on the explicit offer to figure out better measures that would put less burden on ops. And the same people complained about the crackdown that followed. Yes, the rules made work harder. Yes, they could have been changed to make things less onerous. But security was reasonable, they were willing to invest time and money to work with the ops folks - so going around the because you know better is a stupid move. Yet people did.

I believe you. No doubt that this also happens. But I have also experienced developers pushing for simplifications (think customer service UI, extremely convoluted process for testing corrections, etc.) being put into their place, leaving no doubt that they were seen as "troublemakers". So I just wanted to point out that aspect. Of course, things like that are showing a significant degree of organizational dysfunction, but that is big corp today.

I don't believe we're in disagrement. Yes, there's bad management which will resist all attempts to improve things. Quit, move on. You won't fix the place.

I'm specifically pushing against the stance of

> That's the job of management, that's why they get rewarded for that, and I have a feeling we have a lot of bad management.

It's just not. And with that stance, you won't get things moving forward because it displays a major disregard for other peoples motivations, priorities and constraints. It displays the assumption that technical solutions can be judged on purely technical merits while real-world tradeoffs are so much more complex. If you want to be able to move things forward, you need to work with the organizational structure, not shunt off work to them.

N here is only 2. It's pretty plausible.

"Streak" and "series" are overstating 2 by a lot.

You can go to N=1000 schools and see the same attitude.

It's an "unspoken understanding" that a big chunk of the students shall graduate even if most know shit, else there will be trouble from parents, the state, management, and so on.

Literally every organization I've worked (probably 10 or 12 so far) for has had some glaring example of this principle.

I align. We note that N is only an indicator. To actually answer, one needs to seek and analyze a detail after detail of facts.

>> And I’ve learned this the hard way.

I would like to hear more to learn from your experience.

For the said physicist, I understand the situation well already.

> the speaker is just unusually difficult.

"Your actions are making it unusually difficult for us to continue rent seeking!"

I bet the Mafia considers that young police officer that actually wants to stop crime "unusually difficult" as well.

Generally when everyone is corrupt, non-corruption is seen as bad and evil.

As someone who (by the words of a collegue) put a lot of skill points into diplomacy: there are many clever people who just suck at communicating their solution to the right people in the right way.

And then when things don't work out they think it is about the facts (and granted: often it is) and not about the communications.

Institutional politics means it matters what you propose in front of whom in which order and in which way. This is especially true if you are not surrounded by idealists but by oportunists.

Agreed.

The mistake I made when I was younger was thinking that good communication was about being able to clearly and concisely convey the information in your head into another head.

I eventually learned that this was necessary but not sufficient, because "the right way" to communicate varies significantly based on social / political / cultural / emotional / institutional dynamics.

As a young man I simply didn't understand enough of those dynamics to be able to model the when and the why of communication (meta-communication?), even if I was good at the idea transmission part.

Life experience helps immensely here.

Or you became "one of them", and now you too have an agenda.

No it’s not about that. I’ve seen this failure case over and over again. When you communicate, it’s not enough to explain a solution. You have to painstakingly help others internalize the problem. Once you’ve done that, and gained enough critical mass, you find that the solution almost communicates itself. It’s almost like magic when you see an organization shift its thinking like this

> When you communicate, it’s not enough to explain a solution. You have to painstakingly help others internalize the problem.

This is why I think startups or small groups of people are still able to outcompete bigger incumbents. So many people worry “if I share my great idea, someone will steal it and implement it!”

Far more often I’ve found it to be the case that I catch myself wondering if it would be less work to start a competitor to my current company based on my idea rather than continue attempting to translate it, broadcast it, and massage it into some form that convinces a critical mass of coworkers of its value such that it eventually turns into action.

At least by starting my own company, I’ll know pretty quickly whether it was actually a good idea or not.

> This is why I think startups or small groups of people are still able to outcompete bigger incumbents.

For sure. The overhead for communication is much lower. It’s possible to emulate this to some extent at a large company (I worked at AWS previously) by keeping teams small (6-10 people) while keeping team scope large (full lifecycle of an entire product family or vertical). For this to be successful I believe you need to give the team autonomy to decide what product and features to build, and room to fail without repercussions to allow for experimentation and calculated risk taking.

No, you can be a good communicator without being a manipulative asshole with an egoistic hidden agenda.

This is more about how communication works. Communicating ideas and intentions is always about shaping the words that leave your mouth in such a way the other side understands the thing you intended them to understand.

Inexperienced communicators will say what makes sense to them and be surprised when someone else in a completely different frame of mind doesn't pull the same meaning from those words. Wanting people to understand you and shaping what you say in such a way they get it is not a bad thing. You would also talk differently to your kid, than say to your co-worker. This requires to a certain degree that you can see things from their perspective. Now surely you could use this for manipulative reasons if you are a soul-less bastard, but that doesn't say anything about about the practise.

Communication is a two-way street, and is ineffective unless you are ready to answer questions and clarify yourself

Yeah sure, but communication is also something with a growing runtime cost, which is why starting into it with a realistic picture of the other person is important. Most people might ask one or two clarifying questions and stop asking after because they don't want to look like they are stupid.

And the way I like to look at it is that we should try to have a good grip on ourselves first, because this is what we can affect ourselves — how you start into a communication will greatly affect the reaction of the others anyways.

Especially in IT it is not rare that the answer to clarifying questions muddies the water even more, because explaining a thing often requires knowledge of other technical concepts.

I work in an educational context nowadays and the people entering my door might be anything between totally clueless and domain experts, and just by looking you won't necessarily notice who is which, so indeed you need to figure this out in a small exchange. Bad communicators would skip that step and talk the same to both beginners and domain experts until they maybe get the clue, but if you're unlucky by that point the communication has already ended.

I'm with you on this one.

consider this conversation actually happened, this video is just a recreation of it.

Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Not all of them are so extreme but the idea is the same.

That video is not a recreation of any actual conversation.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-front-fell-off/

You may be right but that link is debunking the claim that the video (interview) itself is real, which is not what I said.

They very clearly state and demonstrate it was a scripted satire, and literally say it is a "fictitious interview" in the first sentence. That is as direct of a debunking you can get. Please just take the lesson and verify claims before spreading them.

It's satire of an actual statement from a Minister who said that there was 'no environmental damage' because it happened too far offshore.

https://www.afr.com/politics/disaster-from-oil-spill-averted...

thank you, my memory is hazy but I do recall it was grounded in some manner by something that was actually stated.

turns out I was right, so I suppose the lesson I've learned here is to trust my memory over the random nerd-snipe.

You were not right, the sibling comment similarly clearly demonstrates that the skit is satire, not an actual conversation (being inspired by a single comment from a real politician does not make something a "conversation [that] actually happened, this video is just a recreation of it"). Again, please stop trying to save face and just learn from your mistake.

The poster pointed it out to correct you, stop it.

The details may have not been exactly correct, but the point still stands and your nerd sniping is not useful here, especially with the haughtiness mixed in.

Go alpha somewhere else.

So the sooner you give up and get out the better. Find an organization that isn't crippled in this way. Life is too short.

I actually quite like my organization and the people within it. They are all decent people that are mostly try to make the project/thing good and don't fight silly fights.

The reason I wrote what I wrote is because the need to consider more of the communicative context is something inherent to all communication, not just to (bad) workplaces. Most people would profit from recognizing this, even outside work, e.g. in a relationship.

Are there any resources you’d recommend to learn this? Or is this just something you have to learn through trial and error?

For context, I’m someone who has big blind spots in this area and trying to figure out how to overcome them. Typically, I just develop a set of internal “rules” or principles and then run everything through those rules/decision tree. I’ve been able to overcome a LOT of previous blind spots in this way.

The challenge is that few people are willing and/or able to articulate the principles involved. When I find a book or person who can and will explain the principles and patterns, I’m golden. If not, I’m lost at sea.

Any resources you could recommend would be greatly appreciated!

I am afraid I cannot point you at any single resource, I read anything I got my fingers on at some point in my youth and some of those where my parents relationship/communication helper books, including books on NLP, nonviolent communication etc.

I later studied philosophy and had a look on more formal preconditions of communications, e.g. foundational models of communication, for which a good starting point is probably this wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_communication

I found Niklas Luhmanns system theory extremely helpful as well, as it describes very well why we tend to fall back into different communicative modes once our social frame of reference changes (e.g. relationship vs friends vs family) and how we speak and act is tied to the function we voluntarily or involuntarily assumed within that relationship.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't go around overanalyzing everything, I just think human communication is extremely fascinating and complex and there is so many ways to look at it.

Not the parent, but I recently listened to an audio book by Matt Abrahams on communication that you might find interesting. Several of the anecdotes and evidence explained really hit home for me in regards to being able to communicate ideas in a meeting room.

One of the first stories describes almost the exact situation from the top comment in this thread, where someone with a great idea in an organization needed to communicate the idea to the rest of the team.

I'm usually not a fan of self help type books, but I think stuff like this is good to listen to here and there:

https://www.amazon.com/Think-Faster-Talk-Smarter-Successfull...

I completely agree with your sentiment, but I think whether or not you did vector arithmetic correctly at a first-year undergraduate course level is not subjective.

I matured a different, if not opposite viewpoint: every entity acts in it own self interest, so if the incentives are not aligned, things will tend go south. It may work for a long period of time because of sheer will power and commitment to a greater good from the people involved in the organisation, but over time, everything will follow market incentives.

Public health care seems to be a primary example (and my family has been in the sector for more than 40 years); HC was good for a long period of time then it got progressively worse and nowadays it's just an item in your tax bill. If you literally don't want to die you better know someone on the inside which can push the right buttons or go private.

The money spent on law enforcement had a reverse effect on crime rate, the police actually got less efficient the more money they manage to extract from public funds. They got really good at getting more money from ridiculous speed limits and automated systems though.

Looking in the private tech sector my experience has been similar: the larger the organisation the more it resemble a government and the more inefficiency is tolerated. Within layers and layers of middle management it's easy to waste plenty of investors' money - albeit not indefinitely, like a government would.

>On the one hand, your friend could just be experiencing a streak of bad luck or a series of bad organizations.

I've seen the same play out in several organizations, including the public sector. You don't even need to be cynical to know this is the case...

>when I hear a (first or second hand) account that takes the form “of course I was the reasonable one in every case and these N organizations were clearly behaving like idiots”, I’ve learned to consider the possibility that the speaker is just unusually difficult.

Probably based on different experiences, with different context.

Because in the context described (e.g. the educational example) this is par for the course - and any number of teachers and professors can attest that if you do your work too well and apply rigid standards, you're out of there in no time, or at least make enemies very fast.

>the speaker is just unusually difficult.

Of course, if the baseline is complacency, profiteering, and lack of standards, anybody who stirs those waters is "unusually difficult.".

The college example doesn’t seem likely though. Exams are set by central authorities and independently adjudicated. It’s not up to teachers whether students pass or not, and parents and education authorities look at exam results to judge colleges, not teacher assessments.

Not sure if you have in mind entrance exams or something that's not set by professors (he mentions mid-terms). Or perhaps you have your local example in mind.

This however is absolutely the case in my country, exam questions are set by the teachers, and are graded by them (well, often also by postgraduates given this task by the teacher so they can slack).

As for the US, I did a quick search now, and found this: "Unlike final exams, which are scheduled by the university’s Registrar, midterm exams are typically scheduled during class time by the professor. Some classes may have two midterm exams, in which case they are spread further throughout the semester. Professors outline these exams in the course syllabus, so they will not come as a surprise. The weight of each midterm exam on the final grade is also usually provided in the course syllabus. Many instructors are open to telling students about the format of the midterm exam, as well as the topics or themes that the exam will cover."

So looks like it's on the instructors, as the grandparent says there too.

Virtually all of this is false in the US.

Oh, you really think this doesn't happen. Where I (in Australia) the conditions you paint were accurate for most of my life. In fact they remain accurate for Australian's attending Australian educational institutions now for the most part.

But about 20 years ago, Australia decided to adopt the US model for education - educational institutions should compete for student dollars, just like your local coffee shops compete for customers. This boiled down to allowing educational institutions to charge students what they wish for educating them and the money the government used to give the educational institutions would go to instead low cost loans, and upfront payments for enrolling students so the they didn't pay full price. It sounds reasonable on the surface, well worth a try.

But it was insane to try it in Australia because it has already been tried in the USA where the result was the student debt fiasco. The end result in the lower levels was exactly the same as in the USA, with educational institutions preying on student naivety giving away laptops in return for signing up to very expensive long term courses. Very few completed the courses, so they didn't get that long term money, but they didn't incur the expense of educating anyone either. They got the bulk of their income by getting the government money for signing up the students. The cost was advertising and the giveaways like the laptop. To your point, when the government attempted to clamp down by paying only for graduating students, they simply graduated them regardless of their grades. The model has since been abandoned, of course.

This predatory approach didn't work in the Uni's. I think Uni students and their parents are in general too smart to fall in a long term debt trap, and rendering Uni Bachelor certificate meaningless scared too many people - business and governments alike. But they could and did, and do play the same game with overseas students. Professors are under immense pressure to graduate them, so they get the degree they paid for. There I've seen first hand Professors (Professors in Education no less), sit down with an international student and re-write their assignments for them so they could pass them. They despised it. But the government had reduced funding of local students to force them to become "lean and mean", so to survive they had no choice.

You don't hear about this a lot because everyone involved on the education side is literally trying to keep their job. Broadcasting the educational institution they work for hands out worthless grades undermines that, so it's a conspiracy of silence.

We are talking about university teacher. They are definitely the one writing and grading the exams.

>Exams are set by central authorities

What on Earth are you talking about?

I am not sure how colleges work, but even at reputable universities this happens. Professors who have big fail rates will often be reprimanded for this, regardless of whether it's their fault or not.

Yes, sometimes this genuinely indicates a problem with the professor in question, but often times this leads to a long chain of responsibility passing, where if say a Calculus professor was afraid to have big failure rates, the Fluid Mechanics professor will be in a tough spot where they can either push back and have high failure rates or be more lenient, after that the Aerodynamics professor will inherit the same issue and so on.

> Exams are set by central authorities

… what? I’ve been in (US) academia for most of my adult life and I’ve never once heard of an exam that wasn’t written and graded by the person who taught the class (and/or their teaching assistants).

This is pretty common outside of the USA. Many Euro universities and Indian universities do this to standardize results so student's GPA is comparable across the board

In the case of the college professor and the dean, who is being the reasonable one?

Two is not a large value of N for the phenomenon you're talking about.

Also... is it really that hard to believe that a manager would defend their headcount and a community college would let standards slide in their hardest courses? You also have to consider the plausibility of the stories at hand before writing off the person who's complaining.

I don't think your skepticism is at all warranted.