Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

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When I was doing a cyber training exercise in the military, we had an Air Force general tell us that the best technical officers they had started out with non-technical degrees. They said that officers with undergrad degrees in things like IT, Software Engineering, and Computer Science, weren't very good at thinking outside of the box because everything they did was fairly low level and had a provably correct solution. The officers with degrees like psychology and political science were better at taking in large amounts of information, and deducing a "best" answer to a problem that didn't have a "correct" answer. I noticed the same thing when I started teaching after I got out of the military; people with technical backgrounds wanted a checklist to follow, and didn't really care about the end result as long as the steps were followed. Non-technical students would look at what the result should be, and do whatever was necessary, creating their own checklist as they went along.

As a technical person, I find it interesting that so many technical people are that way.

I start to get into a motivational rut if all I'm doing is working on a list of technical things to complete. Engineering disciplines are some of the few degrees that provide you the ability to both directly solve other people's problems and have close customer contact - that was a major reason why software engineering attracted me as a career rather than just a hobby.

I don't think it's so much that they are that way innately, as we select for it then drill it in further.

For junior and even mid-level engineers, your performance is generally evaluated on checklists of mundane shit. Code is passably neat and organized? Check. Code has and passes tests? Check. Feature checks requirements boxes? Check, check, check.

I think I'm similar (wanting a mix of technical and business problem solving) but I feel like this is the minority of jobs - though I don't have a good way to identify this.

Especially at larger organizations, I've found that the dev role is very much of an "implementer", that your job is to take the design, spec, architecture and put it into place as close to the above as possible.

You're much less likely to be actually sorting out the why/how of the system.

I think it's a learned behavior, they were mainly talking about people fresh out of college who were evaluated based on "use the fastest algorithm for a mostly sorted set of data" type assignments. I worked with a lot of people with technical degrees who learned to think outside the box, but it seemed easier to teach technical knowledge to non-technical people than it was to teach technical people that they needed to change the rigid way of thinking that had been drilled into their head for 4 years.

Easier to teach the skill than the attitude.

>Engineering disciplines are some of the few degrees that provide you the ability to both directly solve other people's problems and have close customer contact

Douglas Adams made his career reiterating the cliche engineers do not communicate with the customer.

David Epstein's Range talks a lot about this issue. He mentions the idea of 'kind' and 'unkind' learning environments. He uses golf and Tiger Woods as a 'kind' learning environment. To be a great golf player, you pretty much just have to grind out the hours and work hard at it. The better players have simply just spent more time grinding away. Epstein then uses tennis and Federer as an 'unkind' learning environment. Federer did a lot of other sports and has many other interests than tennis, and other successful players are similar. Using tricks from a variety of sports and arenas is better. Epstein spends the rest of the book talking about other areas like music, testing, and business and compares generalists to specializers, demonstrating that generalists end up better off in unkind learning environments. The now infamous USAF academy testing screw-up is of particular interest here. As most of life is an unkind learning environment, generalists may be better off than specialists over the long haul. Hence, things like a liberal arts education being so powerful and the paradox of the 'well-rounded vs. spiky' person in long term success.

Lately I have been realizing that this is true for me. I can get stuff done on time when there are existing guidelines/checklist. If not, I tend to struggle and take much more time to complete tasks.

I do have a technical degree. But I think my underlying problem is because of how I was brought up. I had strict parents and family members and was always told what to do. Questioning things was not something I was taught and I grew up to always follow the "rules".

And I think that has (kind of) led to my current state where without rules I struggle to make decisions.

>Questioning things was not something I was taught and I grew up to always follow the "rules".

>And I think that has (kind of) led to my current state where without rules I struggle to make decisions.

I worry that the newer generations brought up in zero tolerance environments will come late to questioning authority, if ever. Life is far more nuanced and negotiable than school and zero tolerance leads people to believe and folks like yourself who aren't equipped to think creatively in these situations have been robbed of a valuable skill.

I think this is almost universally true. When the next step isn’t obvious because there are too many different strands of the project to integrate, progress grinds to a halt. Same underlying phenomenon of what novelists call “writer’s block.”

I worked in a defence company that had a strong revolving-door relationship with the military: several of our staff were recruited from the military, often because they had good domain knowledge and if nothing else could help translate customer requirements into a language our engineers could understand. Their technical knowledge varied but I never noticed any great correlation between their military trade (let alone their original degree) and their success in the company. However, something that I observed many times was that the effective ones rapidly rose up through the management and sales hierarchies, often I suspected because their extensive leadership and people skills gained in the military, as well as decisiveness, let them run rings around management who came from a purely scientific or technical background. This seemed to be truer of the officers than other ranks, especially those who had left because their military promotions and careers were limited by availability of roles rather than (lack of) competence.

[Edit] - people skills. One ex-military guy who was recruited into my team was asked by corporate HR how he would deal with 'difficult conversations'. His answer had to do with telling people / families that their best friends / relatives (soldiers under his command) had been killed in action, or persuading one of his squaddies not to marry the local prostitute. When I decided to step back from team leadership he was my first choice as my replacement, and later became one of the best bosses I've ever had.

That's rather interesting. I noticed a lot of friends who are much better at communicating than those who started off on a technical career with a technical degree. Not that being highly technical is a bad thing but in business, you go further as an employee and/or manager if you can grok what's better for a business. Usually that's where communication comes in.

Very cool example you have there. I'm keeping this filed on my Roam Research documents!

Not the author here but I'm relaying your message to him. He's going to come online soon to reply to the comments. We're on a different timezone

It depends on the mindset of the developer or engineer. Some very smart people just want to code the thing according to the spec and not deviate. They don’t really care about the result because it’s not their problem the requirements are changing. They coded the thing based on spec that was given.

I’ll push back a lot and I’ve seen other much more senior technical people that will do the same. A lot of people just want to come to work, heads down coding, and then leave.

Getting stuck on trying to achieve a certain result and changing the rules to get there is usually a sign of a bad program that is not flexible and brittle.

Sounds like there is more of a problem with how the army is asking verse what they expect. If they were more direct in what they wanted vs measuring some scenerio they created.

And if there is a place like no other that needs out of the box thinking, it must be the military. This sounds like a shtick. The kind of mentality that made them put STOVL in the requirements for the F-35.

> The kind of mentality that made them put STOVL in the requirements for the F-35.

It isn't clear to me whether you think this is good or bad.

STOVL was a requirement because they are replacing the aging harrier jumpjet

Isn’t it supposed to replace like 8 different jets? Seems like an overloaded set of requirements.

Look, there is an essential difference between what is an engineer and what is a technical person. The later want direction, projects broken into epics and then stories, and wants steps. Engineers can make that structure and work better in ill defined problem areas. That's not a flaw. What is a flaw is when tech never progresses to engineer. That's bad for the individual, team, company, and client. Leadership then (in the drucker or tqm sense) is important. Look at IBM pre/post gernster and Microsoft pre/post balmer.

In short rigidity on the part of individuals combined with countervailing organizational goals to combatting same is the issue.

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