This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations.
I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience.
The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?
The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.
I think a better phrase is "everybody is winging it", because once you get good at something, then you tend to end up working on something that's at the edge of your current understanding, either through promotion or some sense of seniority in the industry.
This isn't necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it's especially true in the software industry. I've been a CTO for 17 years, but I still feel like I'm winging it. It doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing, I have enough experience to make good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in time.
I don't remember exactly when I realised that everybody is winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my current abilities.
Thank you. I'm hearing enough things along similar lines to feel odd about it.
So many people wear their impostor syndrome with pride I don't know how to handle it. It's supposed to be ok to have no idea what you are doing. Except it's not. We're living in an era where information is more abundant than ever before. Just read the manual. At least get a basic idea how that library or framework works before putting two lines together. If not for the end result then at least for intellectual pride.
It's probably partly down to age, but it's more and more common and I am uncomfortable.
I'm pretty junior in terms of YOE, but I hate when I see people say things like "don't worry, I have no idea what I'm doing and I have x YOE. You're fine!" to people on the internet.
I have a decent understanding of what I'm doing, but I worked for it by doing exactly what you described in your last paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit process.
If you don't know what you're doing you're either bad or don't have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not good.
> The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?
Well there's a reason to resist this notion on the grounds that knowledge is personal, not transitive. Following John Carmack on twitter does not transfer the ability to design game engines onto me, even though he surely has deep expertise in the area.
My opinions may not be the result of professional scientific research, but that is also true even if I echo the opinions of someone who claims to be a practitioner of such. At least if we accept a definition where justified true belief is necessary for knowledge. Either I know something, or I don't know it. There is no middle ground where I know something by extension of faith in an authority that claims to know it. That's the entire point of science, it isn't doctrinal! The scientific authority may well possess an ability to produce true statements through their knowledge of the topic, but I don't share this knowledge by parroting their true statements; I need to understand why in order to know.
Wrt to imposter syndrome - I often have this feeling, especially since I don't have any formal training in anything IT related.
Recently a kid showed up at work to do an internship. He's studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at even beginning to find the cause of a simple bug in a php application. Incapable of interpreting a bug report, finding the class that serves a certain route etc.
Made me really reconsider my imposter syndrome feelings.
This is just an honest assessment of one individuals experience. I've heard it myself from my father who was at the top of Europe's largest corporation. He definitely is an expert in his field, but still had a healthy dose of doubt and was clearly honest with himself. Hubris is a far more dangerous imo.
I've been around some very successful people and execs at mature companies and you're sorta right but also so is the title. People with experience have more expertise than most people but they're also just much more comfortable making low-information decisions because they know they'll get away with it most of the time and they can recover from a mistake. There is a common misperception that they know exactly what they're doing when they really just know slightly more than the rest of us and are comfortable being decisive.
> The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?
Or folks on your own team?
I've got a colleague with over 20 years of software/web/dev experience, working as a contractor on a poorly run team. Routinely there are questions about "how should we do X?".
My colleague has done much of these X situations for 10+ years, and says "we need to do it like Z. I've done Z for 8 years and this is the normal pattern for this scenario".
There's always regular pushback from others on the team with "well, I read $foo which says Z can't scale!" and similar things. These are typically coming from people with ... 1-2 years experience. One guy just graduated high school last year, but the PM gives everyone's views equal weight because "well, no one can know everything, and everyone's got a right to their opinion!"
Just because the 20 year old doesn't know how to do X, or read that Z is 'slow' does not mean their views are equally as valid as someone who has actually done X multiple times over years, and in some cases has already implemented the X on a project.
He's likely not going to be there much longer - he's already splitting time with other projects, and will ramp down if there's not some bigger changes on that team.
> no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go
IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe.
Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun.
But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges.
The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.
“Expertise” is often less and more valuable than perceived, depending on the situation.
Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today.
Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc).
I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work.
The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.
I think this comment is a comforting fiction as well. Of course "no one knows what they're doing" isn't literally 100% true - it's just hyperbole. The essence of the message remains: the vast majority of people only know just enough to survive (and that's okay!). Survive well enough, long enough, and fortune may favor you.
While I agree with most of what you say, I’m almost on a daily basis hit by how clueless many so called tech leads and architects in the field are. A lot of cargo cult programming and blind repetitions of what someone heard on the latest conference.
I think the problem is that people will optimize for a task they are incentivized for. Many people are just incentivized to appear competent enough to get a promotion or some sort of reward: votes for a politician, sales for a salesperson, a promotion for a manager. This means they don't actually have to be competent, they just have to have the appearance of competence to who ever is doling out those awards. These also happen to be the most visible professions. These things combined create the impression that no one knows what they are doing, and everyone is faking it.
On the contrary, I've been inside of institutions that appear to be a bastion of knowledge and expertise, a castle of wisdom and englightment; only to see the stilts that the whole thing is sitting on after entering inside. Having worked in extremely large corporations and government institutions, leading teams and people, auditing suppliers and vendors; it is humbling to see the contrast between external appearance and internal construction.
I like Peter Thiel's take on this:
Between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism, therein lies human progress.
I see it as coming from 2 different perspectives. One is as you note, an antidote to imposter syndrome ("no one else knows what they are doing so I'm not alone"); the other coming from the opposite perspective: the autodidact who realizes no one around them understands the underlying systems and principles as well as they do, and so is frustrated for the opposite reason.
In software development, a lot of this sentiment gets thrown around to avoid the perception that one's knowledge is somehow gatekeeping others from entering the profession.
This doesn't actually level the playing field, it probably makes it worse because it discourages people from doing the thing that would cause them to get better at software development.
Spend more time developing and less time signaling.
It's verifiable that no politician can possibly be qualified for whatever they're doing at any point in time as there exists no threshold of experience for doing any job to which they might be assigned and it (at least in democracies) actively ignores experience and selects for pandering.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me going in was just how much people know exactly what they are doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the public sector is that there is a very big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing the “smart/right” thing, especially when you’re held accountable by an entire country, if not the world.
I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.
I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.
A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down upon because of their alcohol problem.
Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out of it. He died because he was drunk and after loading a wagon of wood for my grandma he struck his head on the pavement. My father insisted he went to the hospital because he has not feeling well but the guy refused. He died a couple of days later because of brain hemorrhage, in his early 50s.
Another guy in the village, a really helpful fellow, you would never believe it by his appearance or demeanor, but he was a retired secret-service officer and used to brief the president.
A female child development therapist that made a bad impression on myself(she seemed fixated on puzzle solving) was later recommended by others as an expert in her field.
So yes, everybody can have a bad day and its really easy to misjudge someone by their appearance.
I think this largely depends on the definition of "know".
E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.
The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".
And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.
So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.
Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children. But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible, and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a pleasure to read.
They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.
OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.
Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of ill thought out decisions. To such a degree that the people in charge of it are either dumb or have ulterior motives. Having worked with bureaucrats as an external consultant and as someone that provided information to the answers for minister questions, I have a much different opinion of our dear bureaucrats.
They might be smart, but it has no impact on the quality of their work. Right or wrong, good or bad, non of that has any bearing on how they do their work. They want to get stuff done. Without getting in any political trouble. In a way that can be claimed as a win (if it actually is a win is immaterial).
Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to "know what you are doing".
On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation and you know exactly the correct course of action. This is not the case for most things in adult life (especially politics), in which every problem is a new problem, for which you use heuristics to converge to a solution, that isn't perfect, but at least tries something out.
I also prefer your comment to the post. The most successful people in business I know are very bright and hard workers. I like the fact that the writer of the original article is showing some humility. I don't think we should signal however that anyone can succeed in business by bluffing it. I say, have a go at business but don't give up the day job if you can't afford it.
They know what they are doing in their immediate context, they follow the rules of their bureacuracies but have no idea nor possible idea of the consequences of their policies. And their being "well-meaning" has a very narrow scope limited to their immediate social and economic class.
> A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it.
Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.
Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.
The bureaucrats one has to deal with as taxpayer, insuree, petent, or immigrant are different kind of bureaucrats from those holding high positions and advising to them. That's how one gets idea that they don't know what they're doing, they job is to push you away, hold you back. The second kind though... yes it takes enormous volume of cunningness, insight, non-public information to acquire and expand position of power.
Yes I agree, that it is easy to assume people are not clever but you only have to see most Politicians after they leave Government to hear how (usually) perceptive, articulate and intelligent they are - which presumably is how they convinced people to vote for them.
However, Government is like a big corporation with extreme levels of power and corruption in every country. It is also largely unique in that the Prime Minister/President can't just get rid of people they don't like or are not very good at their job, the voters recruited them! So then you balanbce priority, idealism, party politics, saving-face, money, making yourselves look powerful to the world, trade agreements and loads of other things. To be fair, it is remarkable we get anything useful out of it.
> adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true
That's the gist of all of it. No one knows what are they doing because the adults actually don't have all the answers, on the other hand smart people know what they want to achieve and they have idea and a plan for it and simply try their best. They know what are they doing in the context of their understanding, idea and desires, it's just that their understanding and ideas have limits.
I agree with you. One other point I would like to make is that it seems a lot of decisions are made after a lot of fatigue-inducing processes, which just seem to lead to a lot of compromises nobody really wants, but that also no one wants to rebuke, since the process to arrive to the decision was already too drawn-out.
The person drowning looking for help
can become the person in the know with a plan. Easy to forget we were all babies once and learned everything from others. Attitude of course makes a difference. So does luck.
Ex-British politician, Rory Stewart, said that (paraphrasing from memory) that every time he started to understand about a ministerial appointment, he would get promoted to another department.
I worked for an acronym company in which the majority of "leaders" were smart, driven, capable, and despite mistakes that anyone can make, it would have not been fair to call them incompetent.
Some were incompetent, they got promoted into positions of responsibility and power when the company was scaling up so fast that they could not hire externally for those positions fast enough, and the internally vetting was weak. Then, they created their "network of power" within the company and they went on working incompetently for a few years. And then there were people like my former boss who are idiots with an academic title of some weight. Many such cases.
I then worked for a huge company, but not an acronym one, and at the Director/VP/C- level there are pockets of incompetence that are difficult to explain to others and to accept as possible.
CTOs that know little about technology, VPs that ask LinkedIn for surveys of employer retention to make the case that they were not losing more people in a year than, say, Google, but not accounting for the fact that we could not hire anyone for months while Google is so worried about false positives that they reject plenty of very viable candidates. The same slides presented at each all-hands meetings not to reinforce the vision or goals, but because they are too lazy to prepare new slides for an audience of 500 people, who looked at themselves asking: again?
One might say that they are competent at navigating company politics, which is like saying that the employee sleeping with their bosses are competent at getting promotions.
When I worked in academia (not in the US, if that matters), there were plenty of
tenured professors that I would say were in the bottom 5 or 10% in terms of competence, research plans, management of students and postdocs, when compared to all postdocs in the same research area. Useless professionals that schemed their way through academia. And everybody knows that, but people who are inside have nothing to gain by exposing them, and people who leave academia they say, well, not my problem anymore, f them.
In my home country, the vast majority of politicians are incompetent outside of their core competence, which is getting votes.
I was under the impression, when I was younger, that I was wrong whenever I saw someone in a position of power, be it in the private sector or public office, who I saw as incompetence. How is it possible, I was asking myself, that somebody can get promoted, assigned huge responsibilities, be accepted by their peers when they are not at their level or at the level of competence required by their position.
But it is very possible and in reality quite frequent.
>>> when you're held accountable by an entire country...
This is blatantly untrue.
Heck, the infamous trifecta Bush-Blair-Aznar led their countries on a war that destroyed a country and costed many human lifes, based on what we know were lies and invented data. What consecuences did they face?
And that's just an example. I can show you as many corruption cases as you want, and see how the subjects go on with their careers untouched.
Some people do, but they're the minority, and you might not even notice them in the crowd.
I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers.
Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society progressing.
Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist!
Someone figured out all of the amazing things that you take for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you're standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on...
Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that push the boundaries.
I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.
Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice.
The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.
This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.
I dont know why this is getting so much hate, I agree with it.
Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world, which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos, starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)
I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic and unpredictable. Specially running a business.
Not true at all at things that need practice and that are recurrent.
From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg:
1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times.
Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc...
They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation.
2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy.
3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day.
Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.
If the goal is clear, and the rules are clear, the knowing-what-to-do-level can be relatively high. As an example, a typical game can be won with executing on the set rules with skill. You can measure the success of your actions by looking at the outcome. This seems so obvious that I don't think the author would argue against it.
I think what the author is talking about is the space where things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically measure the outcome.
Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is: How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space – but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts?
The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such a way that it entered the goal. Sure – but why? How do you adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to improve?
In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best possible soccer player, how much of your time should be allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that you are also looking at?
And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in practice.
Can you remember when you first started to read? Doubtless you thought that some day you would find in books the truth, the answer to the very puzzling life you were discovering around you. But you never did. If you were alert, you discovered that books were conventions, as unlike life as a game of chess. The written word is a sieve. Only so much of reality gets through as fits the size and shape of the screen, and in some ways that is never enough. . . . Most of the real difficulty of communication comes from social convention, from a vast conspiracy to agree to accept the world as something it really isn’t at all.
Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and find a world of real adults — the people who really made things run — and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter experience, that there aren’t, and never have been, any such people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go — as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells.
Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great Lie to expose the truth.
What people know is just practical knowledge of their immediate surrounding and a bit of theoretical models of what is outside.
If by "knowing what they are doing" you mean deep understanding of everything from the big picture then it's impossible.
Doing your own local stuff as good as possible is the best we can get and it usually works reasonably well. Until we get a dictator in an information bubble, but well that's just life.
That's not quite true. There is a difference between e.g. making a really nice design "as good as possible" but producing something that is not best-practice, doesn't solve the problem well, isn't a standard look for whatever it is that you are designing.
There are many people who at least think they are working hard and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-offs and knows how to measure success.
I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they are doing or even making smart decisions.
The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....
I don't know who said it but "Failing to plan is planning to fail, however, no war was ever won by planning alone".
In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because things take time and investment and we need a direction to give assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical side is working out how to deal with those.
I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be realistic about how messy things are.
I call this the hyper-competence fallacy: the mistaken idea that some group of people (usually the ones in charge) are consistently and significantly more likely to have their shit together than the median person. I've met extremely smart people, and extremely competent people, but they were only smart at certain things, and only sometimes. They still made lots of mistakes, even basic ones.
Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are right without thinking things through and raising your hand to ask questions.
Much more common are the people who are typically incompetent, but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing. People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like they aren't playing catch up most of the time.
Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player, it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad if I lose too many games in a row.
As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing.
Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.
A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the development world because things change so fast you can't really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for very long.
However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy.
Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.
I stopped reading the original article when the OP started including politics.
Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past.
It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP.
What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.
It is a pointless piece of writing. It says nothing. It's a thinly veiled advert for OP's software, clickbaited by a unprovable political opinion. This type of thing should be removed from HN.
There is a kind of subtle
clickbait title style well suited for the HN audience and this article had it. Appealing to intellectual curiosity to read more, promising something like a PG essay but not
delivering anything like that. It is the
one weird trick of the HN world.
> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find.
I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing.
I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.
I like this post a lot, and I can certainly relate to this working in the business technology sector as a developer and as a generalist technology consultant for a large firm. Contracts get signed, and half the time, the seller doesn't understand what they're selling, and the buyer is buying an idea and truly doesn't get it either, then it's up to the technical consultants to take their best stab at it while being billed out as an "expert."
Then you have professions that are much more black and white, mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily understood by the average person.
People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product.
Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing.
Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.
Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).
I think the problem needs to be thought through separately for individuals and for organisations.
For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that understand this and ones that do not.
For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to build systems that take it into account. My company does this -- CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put premium on being honest about problems or capabilities.
Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments. Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones limitations but in practice very close to being so.
If you accept the adage “the greater my sphere of knowledge, the greater my contact with the unknown” (I do), you can see how the author’s sentiment exists even as we age and even grow in wisdom and knowledge.
One of my realizations is that it’s harder to telegraph what you don’t know than what you do know. It’s easy to see that older people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to “know what they’re doing.” In reality, what they know (to some degree) is what we (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like this to exclaim “guys, this journey just keep going! I still don’t know! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end game!” It’s humbling.
Great adage. It's from David Christian in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, but really it's just a paraphrasing of Einstein, who compared knowledge to a circle, and referred to the circumference of darkness, rather than the unknown.
I know what I'm doing, I just don't always know how to do it. But I know how to find out, and I have the mental framework to pick it up quickly. That's what juniors should understand about how this works. You'll never know everything, but you should know how to know.
Actually people do know what they're doing. They're simply making decisions with incomplete and/or probabilistic data. They want to make decisions maximizing the most likely scenarios while minimizing the most negative outcomes. That's why it's called a balancing act and there's various techniques one can utilize for making decisions in such an environment.
This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and complete data with which to make those decisions. That just doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing." That's just simply not true.
I think realizing this was the biggest disappointment of my adult life. As a kid, you think that there are people looking after the world, looking out for the best interests of society, etc. When you get enough and can see behind the curtain, it's very depressing.
I think it's not depressing but wonderful. All software sucks, nobody knows what they're doing, etc, yet the world keeps chugging along and there's all these incredible things to do, amazing foods to eat and marvels of technology to play with. Imagine if we actually knew what was going on! Rather than feeling depressed that there's nobody with an actual plan, why not be amazed that all these things can come out of such chaos?
Good advice. A moral oft repeated in stories. They said it well in Kung-Fu Panda: there is no secret ingredient.
I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.
Having worked many places and looked at various technical solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how perspective.
I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.
"don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it" is probably a more accurate title, but less snappy. Also it doesn't hurt for the title to be a bit polarizing. ;0)
Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article is about. Running a business and having software engineering prowess are two different problem areas.
I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling pretty well.
https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397
"Couldn't read the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."
That's when "you don't know what you are doing" that you can do your best work.
If you know what you are doing all of the time, it means you are not learning new things.
This is what Jordan Peterson refers to when stating that Postmodernist claim about reality having an infinite number of objects that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways is a fair valid claim.
And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized to adapt to a finite number of interpretations.
Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning" that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a sensical meaning of.
i too as a child thought the grownups knew what they were doing. I decided that my ignorance about all things would make for a great opportunity to imagine how i would organize all things. Unbothered by previous art i could have original ideas all the way!
big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to know.... wtf
Did Biden face, and somehow win, a vote of no-confidence from his own party after photographic evidence emerged that forced the police to fine him for violating regulations that he had personally introduced, publicly supported, and denied violating? Because that’s the state of the British government at the moment.
PragmaticPulp|3 years ago
I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience.
The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?
The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.
louthy|3 years ago
This isn't necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it's especially true in the software industry. I've been a CTO for 17 years, but I still feel like I'm winging it. It doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing, I have enough experience to make good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in time.
I don't remember exactly when I realised that everybody is winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my current abilities.
xorcist|3 years ago
So many people wear their impostor syndrome with pride I don't know how to handle it. It's supposed to be ok to have no idea what you are doing. Except it's not. We're living in an era where information is more abundant than ever before. Just read the manual. At least get a basic idea how that library or framework works before putting two lines together. If not for the end result then at least for intellectual pride.
It's probably partly down to age, but it's more and more common and I am uncomfortable.
ZephyrBlu|3 years ago
I have a decent understanding of what I'm doing, but I worked for it by doing exactly what you described in your last paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit process.
If you don't know what you're doing you're either bad or don't have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not good.
marginalia_nu|3 years ago
Well there's a reason to resist this notion on the grounds that knowledge is personal, not transitive. Following John Carmack on twitter does not transfer the ability to design game engines onto me, even though he surely has deep expertise in the area.
My opinions may not be the result of professional scientific research, but that is also true even if I echo the opinions of someone who claims to be a practitioner of such. At least if we accept a definition where justified true belief is necessary for knowledge. Either I know something, or I don't know it. There is no middle ground where I know something by extension of faith in an authority that claims to know it. That's the entire point of science, it isn't doctrinal! The scientific authority may well possess an ability to produce true statements through their knowledge of the topic, but I don't share this knowledge by parroting their true statements; I need to understand why in order to know.
stef25|3 years ago
Recently a kid showed up at work to do an internship. He's studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at even beginning to find the cause of a simple bug in a php application. Incapable of interpreting a bug report, finding the class that serves a certain route etc.
Made me really reconsider my imposter syndrome feelings.
danieldevries|3 years ago
tootie|3 years ago
lowercased|3 years ago
Or folks on your own team?
I've got a colleague with over 20 years of software/web/dev experience, working as a contractor on a poorly run team. Routinely there are questions about "how should we do X?".
My colleague has done much of these X situations for 10+ years, and says "we need to do it like Z. I've done Z for 8 years and this is the normal pattern for this scenario".
There's always regular pushback from others on the team with "well, I read $foo which says Z can't scale!" and similar things. These are typically coming from people with ... 1-2 years experience. One guy just graduated high school last year, but the PM gives everyone's views equal weight because "well, no one can know everything, and everyone's got a right to their opinion!"
Just because the 20 year old doesn't know how to do X, or read that Z is 'slow' does not mean their views are equally as valid as someone who has actually done X multiple times over years, and in some cases has already implemented the X on a project.
He's likely not going to be there much longer - he's already splitting time with other projects, and will ramp down if there's not some bigger changes on that team.
Swizec|3 years ago
IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe.
Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun.
But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges.
The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.
lettergram|3 years ago
Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today.
Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc).
I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work.
The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.
Gravityloss|3 years ago
I can recommend Kathy Sierra's book "Badass - Making your users awesome" on a refreshing perspective on learning, teaching and communication https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24737268-badass
VoodooJuJu|3 years ago
Ma8ee|3 years ago
enkid|3 years ago
systemvoltage|3 years ago
I like Peter Thiel's take on this:
Between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism, therein lies human progress.
polynomial|3 years ago
mattgreenrocks|3 years ago
This doesn't actually level the playing field, it probably makes it worse because it discourages people from doing the thing that would cause them to get better at software development.
Spend more time developing and less time signaling.
OtmaneBenazzou|3 years ago
psyc|3 years ago
cgh|3 years ago
throwaway44f1|3 years ago
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highwaylights|3 years ago
It's verifiable that no politician can possibly be qualified for whatever they're doing at any point in time as there exists no threshold of experience for doing any job to which they might be assigned and it (at least in democracies) actively ignores experience and selects for pandering.
EnKopVand|3 years ago
I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.
I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.
A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.
raducu|3 years ago
My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down upon because of their alcohol problem.
Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out of it. He died because he was drunk and after loading a wagon of wood for my grandma he struck his head on the pavement. My father insisted he went to the hospital because he has not feeling well but the guy refused. He died a couple of days later because of brain hemorrhage, in his early 50s.
Another guy in the village, a really helpful fellow, you would never believe it by his appearance or demeanor, but he was a retired secret-service officer and used to brief the president.
A female child development therapist that made a bad impression on myself(she seemed fixated on puzzle solving) was later recommended by others as an expert in her field.
So yes, everybody can have a bad day and its really easy to misjudge someone by their appearance.
tpoacher|3 years ago
E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.
The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".
And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.
So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.
hyperpallium2|3 years ago
They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.
OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.
tokai|3 years ago
They might be smart, but it has no impact on the quality of their work. Right or wrong, good or bad, non of that has any bearing on how they do their work. They want to get stuff done. Without getting in any political trouble. In a way that can be claimed as a win (if it actually is a win is immaterial).
roenxi|3 years ago
On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.
NewEntryHN|3 years ago
p0d|3 years ago
nathias|3 years ago
spupe|3 years ago
Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.
Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.
benjaminwootton|3 years ago
Horrible outsourcing deals with the usual suspects and enormous failed programmes are still the default.
durnygbur|3 years ago
lbriner|3 years ago
However, Government is like a big corporation with extreme levels of power and corruption in every country. It is also largely unique in that the Prime Minister/President can't just get rid of people they don't like or are not very good at their job, the voters recruited them! So then you balanbce priority, idealism, party politics, saving-face, money, making yourselves look powerful to the world, trade agreements and loads of other things. To be fair, it is remarkable we get anything useful out of it.
kortilla|3 years ago
That’s “not knowing what you’re doing” and not really different from “fake it until you make it” either.
If you don’t have a really concrete plan to achieve a certain goal, you quite literally don’t know what you’re doing.
mrtksn|3 years ago
That's the gist of all of it. No one knows what are they doing because the adults actually don't have all the answers, on the other hand smart people know what they want to achieve and they have idea and a plan for it and simply try their best. They know what are they doing in the context of their understanding, idea and desires, it's just that their understanding and ideas have limits.
rawbot|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
hermitcrab|3 years ago
radu_floricica|3 years ago
hermitcrab|3 years ago
borroka|3 years ago
I worked for an acronym company in which the majority of "leaders" were smart, driven, capable, and despite mistakes that anyone can make, it would have not been fair to call them incompetent.
Some were incompetent, they got promoted into positions of responsibility and power when the company was scaling up so fast that they could not hire externally for those positions fast enough, and the internally vetting was weak. Then, they created their "network of power" within the company and they went on working incompetently for a few years. And then there were people like my former boss who are idiots with an academic title of some weight. Many such cases.
I then worked for a huge company, but not an acronym one, and at the Director/VP/C- level there are pockets of incompetence that are difficult to explain to others and to accept as possible.
CTOs that know little about technology, VPs that ask LinkedIn for surveys of employer retention to make the case that they were not losing more people in a year than, say, Google, but not accounting for the fact that we could not hire anyone for months while Google is so worried about false positives that they reject plenty of very viable candidates. The same slides presented at each all-hands meetings not to reinforce the vision or goals, but because they are too lazy to prepare new slides for an audience of 500 people, who looked at themselves asking: again?
One might say that they are competent at navigating company politics, which is like saying that the employee sleeping with their bosses are competent at getting promotions.
When I worked in academia (not in the US, if that matters), there were plenty of tenured professors that I would say were in the bottom 5 or 10% in terms of competence, research plans, management of students and postdocs, when compared to all postdocs in the same research area. Useless professionals that schemed their way through academia. And everybody knows that, but people who are inside have nothing to gain by exposing them, and people who leave academia they say, well, not my problem anymore, f them.
In my home country, the vast majority of politicians are incompetent outside of their core competence, which is getting votes.
I was under the impression, when I was younger, that I was wrong whenever I saw someone in a position of power, be it in the private sector or public office, who I saw as incompetence. How is it possible, I was asking myself, that somebody can get promoted, assigned huge responsibilities, be accepted by their peers when they are not at their level or at the level of competence required by their position. But it is very possible and in reality quite frequent.
_zamorano_|3 years ago
This is blatantly untrue.
Heck, the infamous trifecta Bush-Blair-Aznar led their countries on a war that destroyed a country and costed many human lifes, based on what we know were lies and invented data. What consecuences did they face?
And that's just an example. I can show you as many corruption cases as you want, and see how the subjects go on with their careers untouched.
jiggawatts|3 years ago
I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers.
Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society progressing.
Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist!
Someone figured out all of the amazing things that you take for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you're standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on...
Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that push the boundaries.
manmal|3 years ago
niko001|3 years ago
thom|3 years ago
The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.
thathndude|3 years ago
shantnutiwari|3 years ago
Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world, which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos, starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)
pier25|3 years ago
I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic and unpredictable. Specially running a business.
quickthrower2|3 years ago
ardit33|3 years ago
From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg:
1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc...
They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation.
2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy.
3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day.
Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.
jstummbillig|3 years ago
I think what the author is talking about is the space where things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically measure the outcome.
Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is: How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space – but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts?
The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such a way that it entered the goal. Sure – but why? How do you adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to improve?
In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best possible soccer player, how much of your time should be allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that you are also looking at?
And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in practice.
It's messy stuff.
hermitcrab|3 years ago
nahuel0x|3 years ago
Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and find a world of real adults — the people who really made things run — and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter experience, that there aren’t, and never have been, any such people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go — as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells.
Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great Lie to expose the truth.
/ Kenneth Rexroth.
sickcodebruh|3 years ago
So there’s no need to be terrified or tense
I’ll just dream about a time
When I’m in my age of prime
‘Cause when you’re older
Absolutely everything makes sense
- Olaf the Snowman, Frozen 2
freiherr|3 years ago
lbriner|3 years ago
There are many people who at least think they are working hard and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-offs and knows how to measure success.
hansword|3 years ago
The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....
lbriner|3 years ago
In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because things take time and investment and we need a direction to give assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical side is working out how to deal with those.
I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be realistic about how messy things are.
karaterobot|3 years ago
Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are right without thinking things through and raising your hand to ask questions.
Much more common are the people who are typically incompetent, but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing. People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like they aren't playing catch up most of the time.
mr_gibbins|3 years ago
As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing.
Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.
BarryMilo|3 years ago
However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy.
Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.
LeonM|3 years ago
Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past.
It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP.
What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.
0xRusty|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
c03|3 years ago
vasco|3 years ago
blibble|3 years ago
ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago
I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing.
I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.
seaerkin|3 years ago
Then you have professions that are much more black and white, mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily understood by the average person.
yieldcrv|3 years ago
Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing.
Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.
hermitcrab|3 years ago
twawaaay|3 years ago
For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that understand this and ones that do not.
For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to build systems that take it into account. My company does this -- CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put premium on being honest about problems or capabilities.
Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments. Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones limitations but in practice very close to being so.
travisgriggs|3 years ago
One of my realizations is that it’s harder to telegraph what you don’t know than what you do know. It’s easy to see that older people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to “know what they’re doing.” In reality, what they know (to some degree) is what we (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like this to exclaim “guys, this journey just keep going! I still don’t know! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end game!” It’s humbling.
polynomial|3 years ago
rpmisms|3 years ago
taylodl|3 years ago
This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and complete data with which to make those decisions. That just doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing." That's just simply not true.
sylens|3 years ago
vasco|3 years ago
marban|3 years ago
Marcus Aurelius
unknown|3 years ago
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darepublic|3 years ago
I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.
hkon|3 years ago
I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.
hermitcrab|3 years ago
rockbruno|3 years ago
websitescenes|3 years ago
GistNoesis|3 years ago
j7ake|3 years ago
The chefs cooking your meals at restaurants would disagree.
Your surgeon would definitely disagree.
I could go on.
giantg2|3 years ago
Thanks. I'll tell my boss and let you know how my performance review goes...
iamdamian|3 years ago
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
mhb|3 years ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...
Hoasi|3 years ago
conanxin|3 years ago
whateveracct|3 years ago
sebastianconcpt|3 years ago
And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized to adapt to a finite number of interpretations.
Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning" that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a sensical meaning of.
minimilian|3 years ago
Who are they?
throwaway14356|3 years ago
big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to know.... wtf
ball02488|3 years ago
ball02488|3 years ago
onetokeoverthe|3 years ago
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TedShiller|3 years ago
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ben_w|3 years ago