Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

This is a common pattern everywhere unfortunately. Snake oil salesmen and their victims.

I have daily skirmishes at my company with our CTO and his subordinates who constantly want to believe snake oil salesmen because they’re looking for simple ways outs of hard problems. It’s really sad.

For some it seems easier to -_trust_ a dude with a power point presentation and no real experience over good engineers telling the truth and trying to help them for real.

I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain. Nice people or not, they’re susceptible to bullshit.

View on HN

> I now think it’s madness for anyone to be in charge of anything if they don’t have relevant experience in the relevant domain.

This.

In support of that idea, here's C.A.R. Hoare, from 'The Emperor's Old Clothes', the 1980 Turing Award lecture:

'At last, there breezed into my office the most senior manager of all, a general manager of our parent company, Andrew St. Johnston. I was surprised that he had even heard of me. "You know what went wrong?" he shouted--he always shouted-- "You let your programmers do things which you yourself do not understand." I stared in astonishment. He was obviously out of touch with present day realities. How could one person ever understand the whole of a modem software product like the Elliott 503 Mark II software system? I realized later that he was absolutely right; he had diagnosed the true cause of the problem and he had planted the seed of its later solution.'

What was the solution here? To learn the Elliott 503 Mark II more deeply?

Given the speaker, I'm guessing the suggestion is that the incident sowed the seed for him to develop Hoare Logic[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoare_logic

Oversimplifying, but quoting from the speech, that particular challenge was overcome as follows: "Thus we muddled through by common sense and compromise to something approaching success."

He then discusses how the problems there led to his thinking on CSP, and, eventually, formal methods.

But, go read the speech, it's much more wonderful than any summary thereof: http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/2010/bib/hoare81emperor...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com