Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons.
* Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance.
* Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
Maybe in the companies you’ve worked for, but I haven’t found this to be true at all
> An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders who are trying to build a team that works together.
Encouraging people to speak their mind is good. Encouraging “maximum confrontation” is just going to create chaos. The goal is to work together to ship, not to argue and defy all the time. I can’t think of anyone who would want to work on a team where everyone had agreeableness dialed down to 0 where leaders encouraged confrontation all the time, except maybe for people who just like to argue a lot.
> Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
Another strong generalization that I can’t agree with. Most people I’ve worked with in software have been so aggressive about bucking trends and trying new things that we’ve had to dial it back a notch. A lot of the debates I’ve had with teams have been about choosing boring, stable technologies over the newest cutting edge technology that’s popular on Twitter. Same goes for business strategies, where I’ve had to deal with everyone from product managers to sales people trying to do things their own creative way when the standard, boring practices are what finally got the job done.
To "turn that down to 0" doesn't mean operating 100% of the time in non-agreeable mode. It also doesn't mean doing that only with your team. It also doesn't mean encouraging people to do it. It's just that sometimes you gotta put your foot down.
You jumped to another extreme, but the whole point is just that both extremes are problematic. An always 100%-agreeable leader needs a lot of luck to succeed.
This phrase:
> a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Feels like something uttered by a cocaine snorting MBA who gets high off creating hostile work environments and enjoys firing people.
I’ve been in environments where everyone is agreeable because they have to be agreeable. They are agreeable to a fault. These environments have a banal toxicity that is hard to pin down, but it shows when there is disagreement. These orgs value agreement above all else, above performance, above achieving goals. They suppress valuable insight because it is uncomfortable to them. FUD is a great rhetorical strategy that I’ve see used to squelch conversation, thinly veiled appeals to authority is another. This breeds complacency and destroys value.
We have a management class in the west that believes that management can be a mechanistic exercise of gathering metrics, assessing performance, and assigning corrective actions. That it can both be systematized and abstracted away from the work is a core assumption of western management. This is a paint by numbers approach, similar to Searle's Chinese room, and works to take the leadership out of management.
You’re right that most of the time the best choice for your business and customers is to choose the boring, stable technology that works. Avoid the rewrite, don’t use the hottest new frameworks, or languages that are in vogue.
Experience shows generally to dismiss developer desires for novelty. But sometimes you do need a novel solution and your developers are the ones who are going to tell you. You will not figure this out by following the rules taught in management school. Metrics like CPI and SPI are only going to tell you that you’ve made the wrong choice on your project when it’s too late. You need to make a decision, which means seeking out information and making the best decision based on the information you can get. This takes leadership.
The best programmers I know have strong opinions. They will tell you that you are wrong. They do this to learn both to test themselves and the people around them. If they are wrong, the withdraw, then more on. It’s the most healthy thing I’ve seen and is actually what builds success.
Disagreement is healthy and good and should be encouraged, when the goal is knowledge gathering. A leader who is turning agreement to zero is a leader who wants to be decisive.
>> Hard disagree. “Maximum confrontation and/or defiance” has never been a goal of good leaders
The problem is that—as a generalization—strong personality tends to correlate inversely with competence, and software engineers esteem the latter above all else (because a machine is not swayed by charisma, after all).
Good leadership is really the combination of strong personality and competence. That combination is so rare that for most software engineers, the safest bet is to simply try to avoid employers with strong personalities entirely.
citation needed
Avoiding strong personalities purely for the sake easing hostility sounds a lot like cowardice. A better course of action is conflict resolution.
outside of that, it couldn't be further from my experience. many many defiant and confrontational founders/PMs, who often actively avoid the accepted "best practice" and rethink what they're doing if they find themselves in the majority
My experience as well. Big enterprise software companies reward keeping your head down and toeing the line, but "confrontational and defiant" personalities trying to reinvent the wheel are a common feature at every other type of software company.
> But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground.
Although not the main point of the article, this is much better advice for finding high-potential employees who are under the radar than the article that was on the front page a few days ago: ("How to hire low experience, high potential people" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288669 )
When the last article hit the front page I couldn't believe HN was upvoting an article that advocated for deep-diving into people's personal early life history as a hiring technique. That's like reading the tea leaves for interviewing candidates.
Instead, this article reveals the real secret: You have to be prepared to do some legwork and research, as well as look beyond the obvious. You could go hire a lot of smiling ex-FAANG people with perfectly curated LinkedIn profiles and professional headshots by throwing large salaries at them, but you're not going to get the best results that way. It's also one of the least efficient uses of your headcount budget and those people are almost guaranteed to ghost you in 18 months when someone else offers them a fancier title.
There is a lot of gold waiting to be discovered among people who aren't curating perfect LinkedIn profiles or collecting famous company names for their resume. It takes some work to find it, but it's out there.
If you have a good perf review system and don’t mind false positives it can work. Maybe it worked better before boot camps.
It shows immaturity to try to shoehorn a C-level job into your resume where it doesn't make sense and where 99% of people will rightfully raise an eyebrow at it. I say this as someone who had "Assistant Director" on my resume as my second job out of college, and I was assisting in the direction of a department of two people. Myself, and my boss. In my actual day-to-day I wrote bad PHP and read HN. It was a joke, and looking back I'm sure there are some jobs I applied to that tossed my resume after seeing that, and rightfully so.
You think they won’t optimize their profiles for their next job?
Would you say “a good resume is a red flag, nobody producing value has time to tend that”.
The big irony is making things look nice, be readable, be sellable is creating value. In the case of making a LinkedIn or a resume, the value your creating is in terms of your very own capability to get a job and have a high take home pay!
> You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting.
So what Google did is dilute the information advantage. The more interconnected we are, the harder it becomes to maintain that advantage.
Of course attribution and linking is important.
I have given our internal knowledgebase documents to ChatGPT and asked for summaries, and it adds in things from the general internet that are wrong to very wrong contradicting our KB (we are very far off the beaten path of conventional audio studio design testing).
You can ask ChatGPT how one might implement and enforce laws in a world where magic exists. Or time travel. Or whatever. Because it knows laws and it knows common fiction tropes and can reason well enough to surmise how to apply them together.
Amazon selling what used to be open source projects has certainly had a chilling effect on people publishing source code under a permissive licence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38369583
One thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available
...
So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one
Though I'd also put "talking to the right people" and by extension "working at the right place" pretty high up there in getting novel information.
I think for a certain generation, Google probably diluted their ability to access other knowledge bases, and act upon that info. And for the generation currently learning how to learn, LLMs may do the same thing.
Strong doubt on the risks part. Sure, for founders. But for executives at established companies, the more senior you are the less risk you have. Severances get larger, firing rates get lower, and you probably have more cash in the bank.
Whats with spotify?
Appears to be blogspam.
My abstract strategy for making contact with the right people:
Try to imagine things from the perspective of the people you're trying to contact. What is their day-to-day, what are they sick and tired of? What will make your cold email stick out in that context? It's click-bait targeted at a specific person. Again, this is probably just one level above what the average person will do. But that already puts you ahead of most people. It gives you some chance of reaching the right person.
The people talking about the stuff largely arent the people doing the stuff because theyre too busy doing the stuff.
Where, in my case, in our tech circle, that is generally design and development. Of course there are outliers.
Great people who actually do great stuff need to become people who talk about it too.
Otherwise only those that master talking will get exposure.
Or maybe we shouldn't organize our society so that "exposure" is such an overwhelmingly positive thing.
Not really much thought or deep reflection on my part,I just feel that they are a type of person that I don’t want to be or follow advice.
So I stopped reading.
Getting ahead of competitors isn't some abstract, arbitrary goal. It's the only way to survive in a business like this.
If your goal is just to write for the sake of writing and you don't care if anyone reads it, this article probably isn't for you.
I suspect achieving what he was aiming for is much harder now than it was when he wrote the book, as the barrier to entry to starting businesses goes down and the competition continues to rise.
But I think there is still something to be said for the goal of building a "lifestyle" business rather than trying to build a hyper-growth startup. If you are strategizing through the lens of "How can I make enough money to survive and thrive with the minimal amount of time spent?" vs "How can I grow my business to $100m" you'll come up with very different plans.
Find a human who can bypass robots.txt/limitations of ChatGPT and find less traveled sources given the internet fails to archive itself and important information can be wiped any minute? Isn't that just called good journalism?
What I see most time, managers buy bright cover, very few bother to look deeper.
And it's easy to understand - as said wisdom, "No one fired due to buy IBM solution". When I agree, not many people are like IBM with near cloud-less clear reputation, but it's just simple and need less energy, to not try swim against flow.
IMO finding these undiscovered gems will stand out more; a lot of content has the veil of originality but lacking.
A lot of content online feels unoriginal or uninspired. Perhaps we'll see the pendulum swing back toward original long form journalism to tell these stories.
(Unfortunately, just as I got time to move it to front burner, it was probably killed by LLM consumer popularity.)
