Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
When I was young I was convinced that life beyond academia in all fields would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any kind of profession, would be super smart and really know their game inside out.
When I started my career I assumed frankly that my opinions were wrong, because of this. In my first job there were a lot of aspects that were almost the parody of how not to do things, yet even though I sensed this intuitively I convinced myself probably for the first year that I must be wrong and this must just be the way things are done in industry. That I would eventually figure out that this was the right way to do things. It's quite funny to look back on that in retrospect.
What I find most impressive about tales of young company builders and leaders, the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their confidence in industry for a few years.
How did they know that they had the ability to build companies such as theirs -- surely were it possible one of the adults with 10-20 years industry experience would have figured it out already? How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults (many of whom I'm sure challenged them and competed with them for influence) as their companies grew? Truly awe inspiring.
They are/were all known for being very arrogant people. Just because some of them become billionaires doesn't mean everyone should be like that.
> How did they have the confidence to hold their own when confronted with such adults
Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing.
Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.
There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other.
Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.
Not at all. Words versus deeds. There are tons of inexperienced people who talk like they know everything; but of those, very few of them actually set out to do the things that "require experience."
Say that there's a person who thinks they have an awesome idea for a game, but knows nothing about game development. It's the difference between them talking about this amazing game they want to make "one day", or maybe them posting on Upwork saying "I have an awesome idea for a game, I just need someone to build it"; and them sitting down and trying to actually build their idea themselves right now.
It's also a question of how they confront obstacles. Most people without this trait of inexhaustible self-confidence, when they realize they don't have the skills to do something, will stop trying to do it, or will shelve the project and set out to first learn those skills. (And maybe never get back to their original dream/passion, instead just using the acquired skills in more mundane ways. All of you here who got into programming because you wanted to be a game developer know what I mean.)
A person with this mindset, meanwhile, will create the best version of the thing they can right now with their limited skillset, and then keep iterating on it, improving their skills in the process of creating the thing.
For an example, there are quite a number of webcomic artists working today, who, when they started, didn't know a thing about drawing (or much of anything, being teenagers), and it shows in their first comics. But they didn't care that they didn't know how to do it well; as long as they could do it at all, they just did it, and kept doing it, drawing and publishing a strip every day. And over the years, doing so has taught them how to draw—such that now, they're great at what they do.
He just kept building, even though he was aware that there was a "competitor" in the space. I mean, look at his very first Usenet post announcing Linux ("just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu") - sometimes "just keep building" is all it takes, and the established leaders have far less of an advantage than we think they do.
And, plot twist: ARM CPUs may outnumber Intel CPUs...
Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because his mom knew IBM executives.
When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.
My old school district has one middle school and one high school, and pushed out the one of the best teachers I've ever had. That said, an organic chemistry class was offered, thanks entirely to the efforts of another great teacher.
I never had any real choices in my grades 6-12 education so, to me, being in a position to choose a school with a curriculum catering to one's interests and talents does seem to be a privilege many people take for granted.
It does, very few parents can afford to give a 100k loan, that's a massive leg up most have no access to.
The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.
Nick D'Aloisio? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_D'Aloisio)
I was confused when you mentioned him, then I realized you think he didn't succeed because he's not a billionaire or didn't create the next Facebook.
Young millionaire studying at Oxford? I would trade places with that dude in a heartbeat. From everything I'm reading on his Wikipedia page, he seems to be doing quite well.
Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for money is not a problem either because they never experienced the process of spending money as painful - their worldview is that you have a certain budget to spend, and when it’s gone you either wait a bit or get some more.
Not to undermine their success, but people tend to skip where their success come from, besides brightness. I mean, you can be as bright as possible, but of course if your parents are the first one investing on you (investing cash, I mean) then everything it's a lot easier.
This happens at various levels of course.
I recently had a conversation with an ex-colleague that had just left the company and was considering moving abroad. He said he had some money saved and I was shocked to hear how much he had saved. When I came back home, feeling quite miserable I must admit, I ran the numbers and understood the where the difference in his savings and mine came from: put simply, I had to move from another region of my nation to where I currently live and work, while he's just from here. The difference merely came from not being forced to pay a rent every month and on top of that, saving more money on others things he just didn't have to pay. There's nothing bad about that per se of course, I just felt a bit bitter because I understood that no matter how good or hard I work, that's a privilege gap I will probably never fill.
Privilege is something many people don't realise, and don't realise how big of an impact it makes.
"Just finished university, $100k to invest, what should I do?"
Wait, how does someone who just finished university have $100,000 in the bank? That's a milestone I proudly hit after several years in the workforce with a good job and living very frugally.
Of course, it's people whose parents paid 100% of their expenses (tuition and living) through university, so every penny they earned from internships, co-ops or scholarships went straight into the bank.
Now ask yourself how much easier it is to start a risky company when the first thing greeting you after finishing school is a 6-figure bank balance not $1000+/month of loan repayments.
Who applied themselves
For every entrepreneur that had a shortcut, there are 1,000s of trust fund kids that vegetate
Its not about your struggle, keep applying yourself
The society benefits
How many families with the Zuckerberg and Gates level of privilege produced nothing significant
> When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things will work out.
But yeah, the advantage of privilege is very real and you don't need Bill Gates to prove it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-private-high-scho...
I never knew this info about Gates or Zuckerberg, fascinating to say the least.
Beyond that it seems rather meaningless to attribute success to privilege over a multitude of other factors. It helps, but it's not the main component. Indeed those with the most privilege tend not to do so well. Consider rich kids who turn into generally unsuccessful adults. Clogs to clogs in 3 generations. The opposite of success.
Meanwhile you have people like JayZ who started among the least privileged (relative to the country) becoming one of the most privileged.
As for Gates, he had the drive and interest to spend his time learning how to program and explore business while he was a kid. While most of his peers were likely using that time to watch TV or party. That's an essential difference and no amount of privilege is going to bridge that.
Privilege is not binary, being born into a rich family gives you a massive amount of privilege that being born into the lower class doesn't regardless of how we compare with other countries. So your point here, is rather missing the point entirely.
Dude his drive and interest was solely determined by his physical appearance aka the fact that he considered himself ugly. If gates could choose he would have been a good looking tv watching party chad. But he was an uggo so he statusmaxxed instead.
This is something that I discovered myself recently. A year ago I quit my job and moved to Australia with practically zero savings. It was a risky move, but I knew that at the end of the day if it all went wrong and I couldn't find a job and ran out of money, I'd be able to just fly back home and stay at my parents' house while I sorted my life out.
Not everybody gets this privilege. A lot of my friends are estranged from their parents, or their parents couldn't afford to put a roof over their head while they sort their life out.
I can afford to take risks, knowing that I have a safety net. I'm not going to end up homeless if a business idea fails or I get made redundant.
I had a decidedly middle class upbringing, but with that I had a lot of opportunities growing up that many people don't get. I have parents that have encouraged me and supported me in my endeavours and have generally been accepting of my (often poor) lifestyle choices.
I have asked this question to myself repeatedly and never arrived at satisfactory answer.
What pisses me off is the shear intellectual dishonesty with which these successes are reported.
Growing up my parents would always give references to such stories and make us feel how lazy we were for not succeeding like those kids.
Those who come from humble background can still make it big but only when all the stars align for them and they are too constrained to only do that one thing.
Rags to riches opportunities are risky bets and only those who can either afford the loss or don't have anything to lose and don't have any other opportunities apart from that one bet wins.
It’s not just that, it’s that confidence is taught to certain classes. If you know anyone who went to “public” (i.e. private) school they all seem to have this relaxed, easygoing charm. Do they consistently make better decisions than anyone else? No, they skip straight to giving the appearance of someone who does, and it’s amazing how effective it is.
I think you can do this in about 2-3 generations. So if you're not primed for success, you can work hard and kickstart the success of your kids.
Of course, lot's of tragedy occurs here when kids don't live up to parents expectations.
Society benedits from having these people around, for when conditions change, and traditional ways don't work any more.
So the extraordinary thing was extraordinary times.
(Other questions: why them and not some other teenager? And how did they transition to conventional business, structure, funding, regulations?)
He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people."
Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his observation that he thought everyone was good at their job when he was a child. But when he grew up and worked with people he realized that there are so many people that are bad at their jobs.
It's in some video or other, as it's a story Blow tells on himself when giving talks. He'd gone over the Doom source code when Carmack had open-sourced it, and Blow was appalled, because it was loaded with inefficient, crude, not-optimized stuff. Essentially, Doom source code was dumb and primitive.
Jonathan Blow's initial reaction was horror and contempt, because the code gave the impression that Carmack was just winging it most uncaringly. Later, Blow decided that this was a process of value judgement, and himself turned against trying to optimize and refine every little code style, in favor of doing stuff that didn't take nearly as much brain and ability to retain state. He took some of Carmack's dumbness and crudeness as an example of where to place your attention.
This is totally valid, while at the same time being a conscious decision to 'just wing it' in many senses. I do this myself, even on public-facing code. In a sense it's optimization and choosing to focus on areas where I can be more useful. At the same time, I'm literally just winging it and some of the things I'm not doing, I'm not doing because I'm too dumb to know how, and would be distracted by trying to learn. If I had great mastery of all these things it would affect my choices, but when I don't I'll take the Carmack path and ostentatiously do the 'crude' thing so I can lean on what I do have going for me.
And having been at the top himself, the principle doesn't apply to him personally.
With any production/consumer scenario it is usually 1 to 1000 or more ratio. Most people aren't making new territory all the time, even inventors or creators. The fact is most of human existence is observing, studying, thinking, following, viewing existing knowledge while very few interact or create new production or are producing at one time on one subject or concentration, we are usually part of the 1000, though we all are the 1s for something.
All of that preparation prepares you for the moment where you meet new ground that must be entered and conquered. So new areas, even for the most experienced, are essentially 'winging it' uncharted territory until it becomes a solid branch of growth in the individual or industry/area of expertise. It is a bit like practice, which is a series of sketches until the time you have to use that skill in production where the refined lines, inking and color are put together, the art of progression/innovation comes together for production.
Then comes the 'here we go' and 'let's do this' moment where even experienced and skilled professionals take flight with the butterflies in their stomach of nervousness and excitement to conquer unknowns in uncharted territory with their pack of experience and knowledge, the experience/book smarts meet the reality/street, the adventure begins.
> Electricians, barbers, gardeners, surgeons, tango dancers, are experts. Not economists.
> The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the electrician, dentist, are experts, while the journalist, State Department bureaucrat, and macroeconomist are not. Since then, there has been a global movement against the pseudo-expert, the serial incompetence of a certain class of babbling and pompous operatives across bureaucrato-academic professions. Which leads to the question: who is the real expert? Who decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it is. Or, rather, Lindy.
Somebody is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.
Only if you either have no objective feedback on your actual performance, or you ignore such feedback when you get it.
Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives.
Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Although "seems" is the operative word: if it weren't for this effect, we'd see many more bridges and buildings collapsing, ships sinking, etc.
It's just that many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve untrained people "winging it", and that's what the article focuses on.
This seems to imply "if only everyone got adequate training". It's not like that, though. There's a lot of important, worthwhile endeavours that inherently involve having to figure things out as you go.
In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.
I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills.
BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write code a few times a month and it is more for stress-release because I've mastered it (and because I am a mentor to / lead 30+ programmers and this gives me a chance to interact with them).
If I wrote code 100% of the time I'd being winging it 1% of the time. So in this regard you are correct.
However, because of how corporations work, once you've demonstrated proficiency at "junior level work" you move up to the next big challenge. Yes, that sounds pejorative, but coding is not hard compared to the next levels of competency: programming is junior level, software architecture is senior level, product roadmap is staff level, corporate direction is above that. Sorry if that hurts your butt, but knowing the latest JS framework or how to optimize your C++ is trench-work compared to convincing the CTO where your division should invest its R&D budget for the next 5 years.
Because there is no "school" for learning how to plan your company roadmap, you really do have to wing it and learn from experience. And since shit is changing so fast... well, sure there are basic principles studied is business (that sometimes are useless for strategy but are good for tactics)... but in tech, it very much is "wtf is going to happen next and is this the right choice." Sure there is an executive board, and vice presidents gunning for your role, but you REALLY are winging it at C-level unless you are in your 70's and have helmed multiple large companies.
So from a top's down view from higher-importance positions, winging it is simply part of the job.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
edit: punctuation and wording
How would you teach corporate strategy in a way that’s simultaneously honest (and useful to the individual) and palatable?
Maybe if you limited yourself to strategy within coops, where the individual’s incentives really are aligned with the incentives of everyone else in the organization, or mid-level management, where you only have a certain category of power - but that’s less useful because coops aren’t so common and mid-level management is ultimately subjected to what the upper levels decide.
In the end, individuals with positions where they have to worry about “business skills” or “corporate strategy” don’t usually have incentives which are aligned with the people at other rungs on the ladder. If you teach corporate strategy in an honest fashion, a not-insignificant portion of your material will be how to effectively redirect money from other areas in the organization to yourself. Most of your students will see that at stealing.
Or maybe you don’t teach how to leverage these strategies, but just how to spot them in action?
Either way, K-12 is traditionally focused on skills that are more foundational and generally useful. Admittedly, that’s changing as some schools introduce things like CS courses, but usually these are electives and not part of the core curriculum.
What really ought to be taught is personal finance and basic investing - those subjects can be molded into information for any age group.
I imagine some of the known valuable skills can be taught to a certain degree. Problem-solving, learning how to learn, assessing opportunities, looking for inefficiencies, communication, telling a compelling narrative, and so on. But I don't think it is easy to teach those things in a highly effective manner, at least not in a short amount of time.
If these folks really are winging it, that's code for "hey, we're dumb, come exploit us". It's where pomp and circumstance close deals rather than actually delivering something technically good. It's where things start turning into a social club but the salaries continue to climb.
What I’m trying to say it’s that winging it is good, it’s good to get lost in a bazaar, we don’t all need cathedrals.
This viewpoint, that those jobs are harder, is just self-justification (either to themselves or to everyone else) for people higher up that list of their higher pay than those below.
I don't believe those skills are actually harder (nor easier, just different), or that you have to be good, e.g., at programming to be good at corporate direction.
What is, IMO, true, is that those skills do have larger impact (or at least, significantly more obvious impact), which is at least a reasonable justification for higher pay.
But don't pretend that being good at software architecture, corporate direction, etc, means that you're actually smarter than that person who's "just" a programmer.
He's not saying higher-ups are less competent, he's saying winging it is inevitable and necessary at the C-level _because_ it is impossible to already have experience and proper training tools for the decisions one has to make.
Highly trained, competent people often encounter situations they're unfamiliar with. That's what keeps the job exciting.
To believe otherwise suggests either lack of training, or ...
I think there are benefits to both, but whenever I see someone complain about everyone winging it, I think they show their incompetence and lack of professional development.
I work in a very fluid field (I recruit salespeople), so the rules are much less defined than if I were building rocketships or bridges or whatever, but there's still an abundance of work out there giving guidance on how things can be done.
You see the same things in startups. The successful ones are emulating a lot of the lessons learnt by people who came before them, and then innovate in a small area. The unsuccessful ones are "innovating" on everything.
It's certainly the cause for a lot of overengineering and early complexity.
1. It's amazing how many people ignore those checklists and processes in the name of winging it, and
2. It's amazing how despite dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people-years in an organization, sometimes there's still no checklist or process and winging it is all they've got.
Your comment has given me a new perspective on what I consider a developer hostile environment.
When you just starting playing a new sport, you are still learning and going along while making a lot of mistakes.
After few years of playing you learn enough (by experience or training), to know what to do and how to act. (think shooting dribling, positioning in soccer).
If you played your 'younger' self, you'd run circle around that person. Hence training and experience matters a lot.
Same with engineering. While products change, some of the same patterns and problems keep repeating over and over, and after few years of work you know how to deal with them, avoid common pitfalls, etc....
So, people are truly "winging it" only when they are thrown to new situations/discipline, but both experience and deliberate training gets you to a level when you can anticipate events to a certain degree, and be proactive towards them. That's not "just winging" anymore.
Venture outside the comfortable and it's back to winging it, though with more proficiency and intuition, maybe.
Everything is a skill, including winging it.
How good you are at winging it is defined by your training, but in a competitive situation, if you're not constantly improvising to match the current state of play, then your play will be entirely predictable and as a result you'll be easily beaten. Think about a football team that runs one of three corners every time. After maybe a match, they'll be beaten by every defense. Now think about a football team that makes subtle improvisations on every corner they run based on the defense they're up against. Much, much harder to study and defend.
Also, "experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance...all else being equal" could mean a lot of things:
1) truly everything else being equal i.e. the person with less experience will do better. (surely that is not the case)
2) Of everything, considered equally, experience is the least indicative of performance compared to education, creative thinking, etc.
Can you link those studies and clarify what is meant by "worst indicators"?
Also, what job was that in the evaluated job performance? I know it's definitely not true for trade skills like woodworking.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programmi...
I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything seems to be very well-polished. At both places, people generally are similar in their ability to write code that does a specific thing, but there’s a night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things, because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In other words, I feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my coworkers fresh out of college.
As an example do you control for total number of x-size projects completed, or do you control for x-size projects completed per time in the career? It should be clear that you cannot keep them both equal, you have to choose one or the other (or neither I suppose).
Sometimes the person at the wheel is just winging it, and often there really isn't even anyone at the wheel steering things.
Anecdotal self promotion: I grew up doing manual labor (digging holes) and whatnot thinking that the AP kids had their shit together. Same once I started AP thinking about college. Then grad school in Aero engineering. Then real aero engineers. Then real software engineers once I transitioned into true software in ad tech. TLDR even when surrounded by ridiculously smart people and out of your depth, I find that holding back because “they must know what they’re talking about” is an unproductive mindset. It must be universal, and I actually find that to be an encouraging fact. People aren’t predestined to their task and even as a noob to a field or discipline, you may have valid insight.
Nope. That's not helpful.
If there's no rulebook I can learn then that makes it worse not better. Lacking an innate ability is not an improvement on lacking some learnable knowledge.