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> "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow." -Charles Browder

Not just ideas, people have lost their careers to unkind jibes. Here's English Cricketer Monty Panesar explaining the unexpected course his life took after a retort by Australian cricketer Shane Warne that "Panesar hasn't played 33 matches, but the same match 33 times" in a damning indictment of his uninventiveness and inadaptability: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/28/monty-panesar-...

A relevant comment from a thread on CalyxOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101853

"I fear not the man who has practiced 10000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10000 times." - Bruce Lee

So now I'm thoroughly confused, which one is better?

The intentional one.

I'm pretty sure Bruce Lee would agree that the one kick needs to be employed in many contexts and situations for that to hold.

I don't think the concept was as well known. There was less chance for robotic/fragile implementation of things in the past.

> A relevant comment from a thread on CalyxOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28101853

Ooh... that's ugly.

Fun story I like to tell people about exactly this.

A little over a decade ago I was working a gig at the software subsidiary of a fairly large non-tech multinational. It was a lot of mostly nice people and a mix of skills and experience as you’d expect.

Anyway - there was a manager (M) on a project I was on who was.. unpleasant. They had quite an ego, and were very much the type to pass blame down the chain.

Regardless, there was a student on one of their projects who was struggling - I had spoken to this person a few times and they seemed eager enough to learn and had a friendly manner. I never worked with them directly so couldn’t comment on their capability - but even then, they were at the start of their career and still learning so obviously you would have tempered expectations.

Anyway, one day M comes in and people ask if newbie is out sick or is coming in later that day. M proudly exclaims that they won’t be coming back as they had a heart-to-heart the day before and M let them know that software development was not the career for them, that they didn’t have the right skills for it, and that they should pursue a career doing something else instead.

M was saying this with a grin, not out of malice, but as if they’d just saved this poor soul from wasting their time trying to succeed at a career that this expert of the craft could tell they were unfit for.

I was utterly dumbfounded that someone could be so incredibly conceited as to think they could possibly make a determination like that of someone just starting out that was getting no support from their boss.

I left soon after in no small part because I actually felt nauseous being around the person after that. I don’t think they stayed around for long but I heard from long-term folks in the same place that the distaste of this individual was fairly widespread.

tldr; we’re all just bags of meat, eating and pooping on a ball of rock flying through the cosmos. Be kind to people, and pull your head out of your ass.

I was really hoping for some karma in this story, but it wasn’t there :(

Thanks for sharing that. It makes me angry; just hearing this, thirdhand, and a decade later.

I was a manager at a company that paid “competitive” (i.e. “low”) salaries.

A significant part of my job was identifying “diamonds in the rough,” and helping to train and nurture them; then, encourage them to stay.

I feel that I did fairly well, here. When they finally shut down our team, the person with the least seniority had a decade.

These were senior C++ developers. They could have gone anywhere.

As a young kid on one of those "competitive" jobs, I've always wondered about this. Do you genuinely encourage them to stay, or do you secretly wish them to move on to better work as well? Surely getting stuck there for a decade isn't the best thing for their career.

Yes, and no. A few did move on, and had well-paying careers, but it took them a long time to find happiness, and they tell me that they never found a situation that was as comfortable as when they worked in my team. The final team members have moved on to do fairly well, although it took a while. They are brilliant engineers, and will be a credit to any organization that hires them.

The pay wasn’t awful, but I was a good manager, and worked hard to accommodate things like family obligations, and, in a couple of cases, serious medical issues. The company had its flaws, but, for the most part, treated its employees well. As time went on, that became less and less. By the time I left, I felt as if the company had become quite rapacious, in its HR policies, and that made me sad.

The pay may not have been that great, but the work was very interesting. We were a marquee brand imaging corporation (which is why they felt they could get away with mediocre pay), and the technology was pretty awesome. We regularly worked with some of the top engineers and scientists in the world. It was an excellent line in your CV.

I have come to learn that money isn’t everything. There’s a tremendous amount of cynicism in our industry, and that is really pretty discouraging. Money has been quite corrosive to the joy of software development, in my opinion. Real damoclean sword.

I can't speak to this story itself, but I wonder about the general principal underneath these sorts of objections.

That is: we should just be naively encouraging of people to pursue whatever they happen to be trying to pursue. This seems born of a boomer-era "be yourself" world view in which "anything is possible". I think this cheats people a great deal.

When physics is demonstrated in schools and TV as some game, it shouldnt take until Masters to figure out it isnt. Programming likewise.

What I see in this culture of "be yourself" is really an admonishment for not "trying to be successful", in the narrowest sense, ie., blindly pursuing programming even though you're not suited to it.

People shouldn't be hoodwinked into careers they arent going to like on the basis they "should like them" because presumably "anyone can be successful" and "everyone needs encouragement". Underneath this ideology is a very narrow notion of success, and a very concerning lack of empathy.

"Encouragement" isnt a neutral good; it's an instrument to develop people -- often in one's own image. There's a lot of people "encouraged" into career's that depress them.

Maybe some people take to programming like a fish to water, but plenty of others struggled at first. Knowing when to give up is important, but part of that is knowing when not to give up. That is a complicated and individual question; an ignorant gatekeeper who discourages anyone who's not immediately successful isn't helping here.

The gordon-ramsey (army coach, sports coach, theatre director, ballet director...) school of "encouragement" prescribes the opposite.

That is: if you arent passionate enough to overcome discouragement, you arent passionate enough to excel.

Of course, we dont need excellent programmers en-mass. However, it is interesting to observe that this "egotistic troupe leader" is a fairly common form of small-group excellence-seeking human organization -- and appears to work.

It gets more-and-more common when looking at how the best "troupe-sized" groups in the world are organized.

I'd be interested in research on this area.

Well, it also has a lot to do with whether or not you want good teams, or good individuals. The "Marine Bootcamp" methodology is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, and is how we make good teams.

Teams are how we make awesome stuff, but individuals are how we conceptualize awesome stuff.

I've found that the best products come from hybrids of the two.

I think this is a really helpful remark.

If you look at where this works, the team simply needs to execute -- largely not think creatively. I can see, then, why this is a comparatively rare form of organisation in programming teams.

I wonder if there's room for it in programming training. Imagine being drilled to produce the same algorithm in a variety of languages over-and-over. Would this be useful? (I use to drill myself in writing dynamic dispatch MVC frameworks as a teenager; I could produce a whole framework and app in a 1hr technical interview -- is this useful? I dont know).

I raise this because I've become increasingly interested in rationalising the Ramsey-esq autocrat, as its always been a part of myself I have been most self-critical of; because I am at once very sensitive to upsetting people but also "brutally attentive" to their (and my own) failure.

I have recently been asking myself: is this brutality actually useful? How much? Does it really require the humiliation a Ramsey or drill-sarg engages in?

Recent western cultural mores are aimed at ameliorating ego-injuries. Is there value in causing ego-injuries? Is there value in humiliation? Clearly there is -- it works in some cases.

Its a weird question to ask though: our culture is so preoccupied with preventing ego-injury... it seems immoral and absurd to suggest causing them.

I don’t think there is value in humiliation. I feel like it will attract a certain kind of personality. Maybe you want that in a group of Marines who make life and death decisions. Most programming jobs luckily don’t involve those kinds of choices (the exceptions may be medical devices, manned rocket software etc).

Importantly you are discouraging a whole bunch of folks who might have much to contribute but have been chased away by the distasteful practices in the industry.

So I’ve thought about this in the years since.

Here’s the thing though: the person in question was already struggling, as a new person in an office of people with experience, without assistance from their manager.

For their boss to tell them some variant of “you’re not cut out for this” in that vulnerable of a position when you have no frame of reference (and when it’s from the same manager that was supposed to have been helping you) is wildly different to hearing that from an impartial peer.

In several of those contexts, quitting is going to be even more painful than perseverance (in terms of both social shame and punishment). You don’t need to worry about alienating captives.

So true. Direct feedback is way under appreciated.

Litmus tests are how git has managed to get away with having such an abysmal UX.