How Bullshitters Not Just Survive But Thrive (2016)
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1. has never had the misfortune of working with one of these people. "poser" devs who care more about "communicating up" and making a show of their (often quite trivial) contributions
2. has worked with people like this, but doesn't perceive the behavior described in the article, for whatever reason.
A couple times in my life, not just in software, I have worked with people who are _exactly_ like the article describes. The work they do is all perception-management stuff. Shuffling around work tickets, setting up/attending meetings, etc., when they are supposed to be individual contributors. Meanwhile, they contribute nothing. I've even had a coworker -- a peer -- come to me to ask me to do a task when they were assigned to do it. Because they were busy organizing work tickets.
Don't get me wrong. You have to toot your own horn when you do something that should be noticed. Your boss won't always recognize when you've made a meaningful contribution, so saying, "Hey I did this and it's pretty good, and it adds value to our org in these ways" is not inherently bad.
It's when that autotooting is to bring attention to stuff outside what they're _supposed_ to be contributing that it should raise red flags. Or when they start trying to delegate work to their peers. I'm really glad so many of you find this article so awful because it means you've never felt the frustration of watching someone like this get praised for and advance by essentially doing nothing.
edit: I don't know how to explain it to someone who hasn't ever noticed it. The behavior pattern in the article is not something a lot of people notice. But among people who do notice -- at least those I've talked to -- it's very obvious and really bothersome.
That said, most of the time coworkers -- even really smart, kind, hard-working coworkers -- either don't notice or don't care. So it's not surprising to me that commentators here think the article is BS. You've probably sat next to people like this but you didn't notice. Good on you.
I truly don't understand why he still has his position. The sad thing is that he'll probably get promoted.
- documenting their BS claims (for your own usage, primarily)
- building trust and credibility with superiors and peers
- biding your time and eventually calling them out on BS in meetings, but only doing so when:
a) they go quite deep into the BS (as they inevitably do)
b) you have firm and credible facts/knowledge ready to use against the BS
c) you are able to pull it off in a calm manner, preferably something that could be perceived as you just asking for a clarification, but still leaves the meeting in a slightly uncomfortable state because the bullshitter's "explanation" seems so obviously fake to anyone with half a brain.
2-3 well-directed questions for "clarifications" like that can be quite lethal over time.
Anyone who is doing a good enough job of perception management is going to be better at managing perceptions from conversations better than you. They've had more practice!
You can end up looking like a person who overly cares about individual glory/not being a "team player"/trying to rain on someone else's parade.
Especially with C. People can spot disingenuous comments much easier than non-expert comments.
And easier way would be to implement something like stand-ups or demo days where each person has to own something.
Consistent underperformance should then be easily visible.
They will see you coming long before you see them. They will have previously set up their reward system with you so it's a Mutually Assured Destruction relationship.
This seems like a great idea until you realise that these bullshitters thrive together and the meeting is full of them so they are going to hang on each others claims.
My favorite trick is the Strategic Vacation. Somehow he always has a long vacation planned months in advance that allows him to dump whatever he's been tasked with onto someone else (like me, for instance).
"It's basically done, but I haven't added Y or Z yet" is always the prelude to receiving something he's been "working on" for three months and actually put in, charitably, two or three days of actual work.
But he's a good looking, personable kind of guy. Everybody likes him, particularly the managers, as a person. So while nobody wants him on their team he's managed to avoid getting a reputation that would keep him from moving to other teams.
I am familiar with this one as well.
Reminds me of the Typical Day interview (from Office Space): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOEQOtBlQ
I've worked for a small startup that got reasonably big. We started out with several really good and hard working people. The problems started when we started to get successful and got some investors on board. We were quite well known in the industry we were in and when word got around we got a bit of investment money and we were hiring it attracted a lot of management-types who mainly applied for the status we had. Lots of people with negative productivity. Took a few more years before the company went belly-up.
It has to be possible, right? After all, they are reading and replying instead of working.
I've got a colleague who worked someplace where there was a lot of this going on by most of the tech team. He got chastised in a review because he wasn't closing as many tickets as others. What most others were doing were inflating ticket count - taking one ticket, making 3-5 smaller tasks, doing those, then closing all 5. Sometimes there was more work in making 5 tickets than just doing the original work, but their numbers were "way up". My friend was counseled to do the same so everyone's numbers were "up". As it was, he was the only 'low' number and it was bringing down other numbers, and no one was happy about that. Didn't matter that the same amount of work was being done (or... actually more 'make work' was being done vs real productive fixes)... the numbers mattered to the whole place. And... I think they were trying to get lots of positive metric numbers to beef up the sale that happened less than 18 months later.
You're ignoring the third possibility: S-W and CB types are more likely to say negative things about this article, and upvote criticizing comments (like one by basseq).
Personally, I largely agree with the article (I relate to the W-S type). However I didn't really understand the difference between S-W and CB (highly distilled version? author didn't expand on that). To me, all S-W types look like bullshitters.
He's absolutely bang on that when a bullshitter hits a performance-based situation they're screwed (I'm an early career academic in exactly this situation, it sucks).
S-Ws who don't want to change may well be criticising the article, but there are hopefully some other self-aware ones too!
I've been in a situation many times where I couldn't figure out what value a CB was adding, but those who worked with him/her spoke glowingly of them or thought highly of them. So, since they were held in such high regard by others, I assumed that I must have been mistaken in my initial assessment of the person -- all these people can't be wrong, can they?
What the CB is doing is taking advantage of the fact that people more distant from you in the org chart form their impression of you based on very small pieces of information. But, the perception of those distant (e.g. higher) than you can have a greater impact on your trajectory than the perception of those around you.
Bullshitters are responding rationally to a set of incentives which rewards pleasing people far removed from one's actual performance, versus pleasing those who directly depend on your performance.
This is a key point. It's not like these people get up in their morning, have coffee in their evil lair, twirl their mustache menacingly, and decide "I'm going to cheat again today, muahahahaha!" They're not cartoon villains, they are rational actors, playing the same game as us with the same rules, but those rules reward BS and self-promotion, often to a greater degree than Real Work™.
The thing that's annoying about the article to me is:
1) I've worked with people who were highly competent, more competent than me but who still engaged in variety of infuriating mind-games, appearance management and so-forth, egos so big they needed to make other look small just for kicks, even if it made the work harder. Even if they deserved recognition for their actual abilities, they needed more. And this kind of bullshitter is at least as corrosive as the incompetent bullshitter.
2) It seems to express the view of a particular sort of "small chunk" thinker who imagines that people who are competent at a workers job should be the managers. That's not how any organization can or should work. Managers are competent (or not) at managing. Managers need to control appearances in various fashions. Some of that managing looks like bullshit, some of it is bullshit and some of it is "necessary shit" but the measure of the manager isn't their ability to understand your job. People aren't divided into "competent" and "incompetent" but rather people have different competencies as well as having situationally dependent competencies (and naturally, it's hard to be competent if your manager is always bullshitting you).
For instance with the first example W-S in the article someone could very well be a W + S but you'd never know it because at their last job or through life experiences they've been beaten down constantly for their ideas even if they were great simply because of who they are or other such factors. That lead them to the self-confidence issues described in the W-S category in the article. I find people who do excellent work are rarely stupid and with guidance can even grow and excel to become great. Maybe not enough to become leaders but not everybody should be.
I get that the point is to raise awareness on the 2nd group described so the behavior is eventually adjusted or pointed out in other settings and I'm thankful for that because I've experienced it at work myself. Many people have probably experienced the same on group projects in school or otherwise. The ones who don't pull their weight but always seem to have an idea. The people here that think the article is BS might just not agree with the tone adopted for the subject at hand which is understandable as it comes off a bit condescending while getting its point across.
The massive characterization: the sloppy nerd (W-S), the consummate bullshitter (S-W), and the "rare" real talent (W+S). Which sets up the classic, "you're successful, so you must be a bullshitter" (because those S+Ws are sooo rare).
The "CB's" he's describing are so incredibly transparent, they might as well be strawmen.
Strawmen or not, I've worked for two. Those aren't fond memories.
I'm confused why so many commenters are quick to shout "B.S" on this article (are they BSers in hiding?) but maybe he is oversimplifying too much. True S-W types are pretty rare and are probably evidence of some extreme psychological disorder. (E.g., malignant narcissism or sociopathy. Robert Hare is a researcher in criminal psychology and wrote a book on such people: https://www.amazon.com/Snakes-Suits-When-Psychopaths-Work/dp...).
maybe he is oversimplifying too much
There are almost certainly more variables, and "smart" and "work" are terribly named.
In other words, an individual's value is context-dependent. It's really hard to make such crisp distinctions as in the article.
IMO effective managers should be doing exactly that -- surround themselves with smart people, delegate and make working conditions fulfilling and enjoyable for their teams.
Management is also much more than _just_ delegating (of course), and I think I'd be pretty clear the difference between a good manager and a bullshitting manager, unless the higher ups are easily fooled in the ways the article describes.
Personally, I've seen a lot of this kind of behaviour, and I thought the article pretty much nailed it. Tangentially related to the highly cynical Gervais Principle: http://www.makingitanywhere.com/escape-your-job/
My point was that the classification into S-W, etc. is simplistic and does not distinguish between good managers and poor ones. Good managers exhibit some of the same traits (delegating, surrounding themselves with smart people, etc.).
On stealing credit: can you elaborate what you mean by that. In my book, a good manager should advertise his best contributors to his management in exceptional cases. But most of the time, the manager himself should receive credit from his superiors on his team progress and request goodies (raises, bonuses, etc.) for his team in return.
As they are focusing on perception, effective real work done becomes less. If the client once chooses to evaluate real progress and the paper-pushing becomes evident, the project might be cancelled.
The bullshitter can transform the project itself. Instead of pursuing the original goal of delivering, they will invent new goals, and unnecessary work items. They will shape what the project does, so that they can deliver. If the project were to go in its original direction, they could not contribute anything useful. So now they invent administrative tasks or superfluous technical tasks, where they can deliver.
Their toxic behavior can become accepted even by the management. This is when the real project manager accepts that its more profitable to bullshit, than to actually deliver. The project will fail at some point, but its easier for the whole team to bullshit until that time, than to deliver.
Competence as perceived by your boss and boss's boss are driven by your results and perception management. And this problem gets worse because they higher you go the less control you have over your actual results. i.e. A developer has a lot more control in delivering a solid piece of performant maintainable code than a V.P. does in delivering revenue growth. And eventually you end up with CEOs who sit around and play roulette while explaining to the board how the losses were unavoidable, and the wins solely driven by his leadership.
In many scenarios, it's easy for a person to be in the "S-W" role and get a great deal of success. I've watched the career of one in a large organization. At first they stumbled a few times and were "outed" as idiots. Then this person found the right role, and is now a senior leader. The true master bullshitters are insecure & smart and surround themselves with pliable people who will work like donkeys.
The tell for these people is vanity. They seek self validation by advertising credentials, announce any promotion and are forceful about projecting whatever title or responsibility they possess. Usually they are attracted to "hot", high growth areas. (easy to hide sins in growth) Infosec is a breeding ground for these people.
If the pay was good it might be worth teaming up with them. I can handle the work if they can handle all the other shit.
The characterization is a bit overdrawn, but not by much. In my experience the more common scenario is not that of the S-W who does "no work" -- but rather the kind who basically does seem to "deliver" a lot, but, and here's the catch, with very significant hidden costs: in the form of (outrageous amounts of) technical debt, people around him burning out and/or quitting, etc. Which management usually does, ultimately, catch onto -- but not until the damage has been done, business opportunities have been lost, and his coworkers health, relationships and/or professional reputations have been damaged -- in some cases quite severely.
I then spoke to him about this piece - http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/19/the-art-of-gig/- which I think is hilarious.
What would be nice, is if there was a way to somehow gain intrinsic motivation to do stuff that interests you? I get extremely excited about projects at first and then tail off.
I'm not a "finisher", and I would give a large chunk of my salary to someone who enabled me to become one.
With both Pomodoro and GTD, ideally you'd learn to switch more quickly between the planning brain and the doing brain. This allows you to decide what to focus on, acquire full confidence that it's the right thing to do now, and act on it. This helps you tie the immediate need to your larger goals, channeling your motivation for big rewards into the task at hand.
Here's hoping I can actually find the motivation to read it and then apply the lessons!
Also, in today's world, learning how to control my attention is one of the most powerful tools I've picked up. I've done it through mindfulness practices, and boosted it through the use of high CBD:THC pot. If you don't live in a state with legal weed, CBD oil is available online and can be legally shipped.
I can't tell you how nice it was the first time I noticed I was able to sit still for 45 mins without fidgeting.
When I apply my attention to distracting beliefs getting in my way, I recognize I have the choice to believe the thoughts and choose to believe their opposite instead. Choosing to believe a thought isn't a skill many people practice, so most people change their beliefs through the use of affirmations. I do that, as well, and write them on my bathroom mirror with dry erase markers. When I'm brushing my teeth, I read them in my head. When doing anything else in front of the mirror, I read them aloud. If writing your own affirmations, make sure they start with "I," are in present tense, use positive language ("I am ____," as opposed to "I am not _____"), and are emotionally powerful (look for a physical reaction when you say it, like warmth in your chest).
I should mention that i was working in cell biology; in cell biology, you earn career points by publishing papers telling a new story, where papers comprise a series of figures, each one showing results which demonstrate some point of your story. Papers also have an introduction, description of the results, and discussion, but those are pretty much filler. The smart scientists i know read the title, the figures, and the materials and methods section. Perhaps not every field is like this.
So, to make a good paper, you have to come up with a series of good figures, which means (a) finding a story you want to tell, (b) working out what points you want to make, and (c) getting results which make those points. Having done that, there's the technical work of making up the figures (learn to love Illustrator), and some writing, and you're done.
Finding the story is usually the easy bit. Your supervisor usually has some untold ideas for stories floating about, or there will be some variation on an existing story that people will enjoy hearing. Or you might just need to spend a year or two trying stuff, which can be fun until it suddenly isn't.
Working out what points you need to make takes time, but once you know the story, is usually not too hard. Crucially, you don't need to know up front that these points are all true. As you work towards them, if you find any that aren't true, you just throw them away, and either replace them, do without them, or change the story a bit.
It's getting the results which is hard. That is the actual work in scientific research. Designing, performing, interpreting, and refining experiments. Finding, preparing, and characterising materials. Learning or inventing techniques. Spotting weaknesses and plugging them with control experiments. Endless, seemingly incessant, tea breaks.
Having a concrete list of the figures you need helps you keep going at getting results, and helps you do the right ones. Before i had a list of figures, i did all sorts of experiments because they seemed interesting, and connected to what i was doing, but which could never have contributed to my paper.
Hopefully you've saved my career before it implodes!
Once he got done telling them all about the strawberries that were 50 cents a pound underpriced at Safeway, `15 minutes later they could get back to work. He not only wasted his time, but also his co-workers.
Productivity noticeably went up after his departure. Nobody had complained about his time wasting stories until AFTER he left. Somehow they assumed I knew everything but didn't care (bizarre, since I am fairly frugal) .
So as the Boss in this scenario, sometimes it is hard to tell what the truth really is. My staff was trying to be nice, and not cause problems in the workplace. Thus causing a problem in the workplace.
Occasionally I do the Toyota 'stand in a circle' exercise in the factory to get a real sense of how people move around, how they spend their time. It is always surprising how my assumptions are often wrong.
http://theleanthinker.com/2007/07/09/the-chalk-circle/
I also watch for the "delegate to peers" routine. If I assigned it to you, I wanted YOU to do it. If I wanted your co-worker to do it, I would have assigned it to THEM.
1. It is incorrect, and the author misunderstands the nature of management
2. It is neither correct, not incorrect, but is vapid and superficial
3. It is basically correct, but poorly written and reasoned
4. It is correct
Let me respond to category #1 and #3, and try to unpack the claim made in the article.
I assume that there is no debate that some people do not add value.
Most people may also agree that there are some people who do not add value on purpose. That is, they are not interested in adding value. What might be more controversial is that there are many such people, and they are successful.
If you believe that there are people who purposefully don't add value but exist and thrive, then who are they, how do they thrive and why aren't they caught?
I think you will end up with some version of the argument presented here.
The most common type of developer is the fourth category, missing from the article: the -S-W type. Not really all that good, and with little to no political acumen. They fill most roles at medium-to-large IT companies.
And having known many (a lot of them are nice people otherwise), I can tell you that each and everyone of them thinks they personally are a W-S type. They think their uninspiring, slow, painful expertise (if its hard for them its because it must be a hard problem, right?) makes them top of their field, and that when other developers are the 'superstars' its just because they are better at politics.
The biggest truth, the most important truth that the article seems biased against, is that unless you live in a cave working on software with two other like-minded hardcore devs, 50% of your job is communication! Not being good at communication makes you a bad developer, regardless of your technical abilities.
Communication:
Regardless of how smart you are, if you can't communicate it to others, then then value of your intelligence is limited to an individual role. People who can't/won't communicate make terrible managers. The people above them have no idea what's going on in their team. Poor coordination with other teams creates issues outside of their team. Their own team members will fail to understand what role they are playing in a larger effort. The non-communicating manger will know (because he's in the meetings), but will fail to pass that information to their team. As you move up the chain of command, communication becomes more important than what you as an individual can produce.
Confidence:
Your car breaks down. It's critical you have it working tomorrow. Two mechanics show up.
- The first mechanic says: "This is really tricky. I don't know if we can get this fixed tomorrow. It may take a week. I'm not sure"
- The second mechanic says: "This is no problem. I'll have it fixed by tomorrow".
Which one are you going to hire?
Perception:
The hardest pill to swallow is that upper management is very aware of what's going on in a team, especially when the manager is a problem.
- upper management has usually seen it all before. So any behavioral issues are easily spotted.
- Team members complain to people on other teams, and word gets around.
- Team members will request re-assignement or discuss quitting.
Performance over Perception:
Performance is always more important than perception. The issue is a lot of employees don't understand what the priorities are for their organization.
The priority is almost always. How efficiently and predictably does the job get done. Efficiency also includes how much hand holding someone higher up has to do.
Looks like a blurred Japanese painting. I see 2 samurai, one standing on the left, one dead on the right (face down, you can see his hair). I can't explain the horn helmet the standing samurai is wearing, though.
> If you still can't see the cow, please search "visual intelligence cow" in Google images
Oh. A cow indeed. (It's head, facing the camera.)
(Not bragging about recognition by any means. Grew up in dairy country so I probably see too many cows in things overall!)
I do remember hearing that it's one of those things you can't ever "unsee".
https://boldquestions.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/cow-outlin...
I'm not disagreeing with you entirely, just proposing that it isn't usually so black and white in our industry.
Focus on deliverables and that outs the bullshitters very quickly.
To make it worse I tend to start stuttering when asked things on the spot, even though I know the answers or could easily look up whatever info was asked for. I'm painfully aware this makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. People generally don't have the patience to let me gather my thoughts and give a coherent explanation/answer.
Too bad linkedin has declined in usefulness, it was almost getting good.
Anyway, pure political posers are nothing new.
Not everybody has it in them to actually make worthwhile efforts, or make efforts worthwhile to anyone but themselves.
Plus most BS proponents are not in the pure category, with significant to considerable raw ability but who still draw from the BS deck when threatened or with opportunities that might fall to truly higher quality operators instead.
Often motivated most strongly by greed, and without real value-creating talent or productive performance to fall back on, there's not much else they can do to survive.
A great many have been this way for life, and know it well, therefore have a lifetime honing their survival skill. Some get especially good at inserting themselves into the background BS of particulary vulnerable or susceptible bureaucracies, where they can often thrive (exclusively to their own advantage). They sometimes accomplish this without becoming a destructive enough parasite to be well recognized by those who should care. And sometimes those who should care, actually don't care to begin with, or have had their doubts diverted by carefully crafted BS fields.
For technical or scientific concepts to thrive instead, there must be none of these BS operators between the technical creators and the resources the creators rely on (such as funding resources from capitalists, income from clients, or customers).
IMO this is similar to the player/cheater categories. There are people who cheat in online games, and ecosystems suffer from it - anti-cheating precautions make games more expensive, and after playing against a cheater, you feel, well, cheated. It can ruin your experience.
The problem becomes more pronounced the further we abstract away from Assembly and memory management.
I guess that's a more interesting story than W-Ss that 'disappear' after they get burned by the corporate environment.
This part is illegal as hell and pretty much sums up why a union is absolutely needed in some workplaces; to curb this kind of crap.