Don’t Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

5 points·shantnutiwari··6 comments

Author here, thanks for sharing this. Let me know what you think.

I'm trying to connect the dots on research on expert advice and our fields 'thought-leaders'.

The connection is a bit tenuous but I think contingent advice can be shown to be better than non-contingent advice. I also think people are too confident in their opinions.

Is there any phrase worse than "thought-leader"? Awful.

I liked the "extended-roadmap" suggestion. The planning process parallels code review in that often people will inject themselves unnecessarily into the workflow, so having ways to satisfy everyone's need to be involved without compromising the actual product is fantastic.

Thanks for reading!

I actually wish I had a better term than thought-leader, because there are people who use that term non-ironically who do have contingent and useful advice. But yeah generally it't not a good sign if that is how you describe yourself.

To be clear, I wasn't maligning your article! That phrase has always been a bit grating to me, maybe that isn't a universally held view.

Thanks! yeah, I got that. I was just considering in a comment the fact that I wish I had a better word for people with strongly held believes that their solution will solve all things.

Architecture astronaut is one Joel Spolsky used back in the day that I liked. Maybe solution peddlers? Thought-leaders works though and yeah I think for most people it is pretty cringe inducing.

Great article. It put into words a problem I've had with the holier-than-thou advice giving mafia :) I now realise that the reason I found teh advice irritating was because it was generic and unfocussed on my problem

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