Belling the Cat | Hacker News Reader

Belling the Cat

en.wikipedia.org

116 pointstosh22 comments

I've always felt a connection to this story in my professional life. I've been in enough rooms full of "ideas people" who will spend an entire meeting talking about tools that should exist or processes that need to be changed, if only "someone" would implement it. It's about work that everyone agrees someone else should do. Everyone wants the cat belled, no one wants to do the belling.

... I've sort of had a different experience. I've been in roomfuls of "ideas people" and I've been in roomfuls of "execution people" and in roomfuls of "tell me what to do people."

None are effective in isolation. If your CEO / tech lead is an idea people, your COO / project manager an "execution people," and the team "tell me what to do people" things work pretty amazingly.

I think the problem is that people like to hire people like themselves, so a balance is hard to find. Each group is self-perpetuating.

I'll mention: I stated my career in roomfuls of idea people, and was deeply surprised the first time I ran into a "tell me what to do" person. That person worked hard, and was possibly the best software engineer I've worked with, but:

(1) Deeply didn't care about much beyond coding.

(2) Valued having people around him who can structure his work so it has meaningful impact.

Personally, I really benefit from having a watchful project manager to keep me on track. Once I gave up on doing that myself, my productivity skyrocketed. I tend to empower project managers (and admins and similar roles) to boss me around much more than the job description entails.

> I've been in roomfuls of "ideas people" and I've been in roomfuls of "execution people" and in roomfuls of "tell me what to do people."

Spot on. Also, the same person or group can overdiscuss one thing and underdiscuss another.

Talking and easy. Analyzing something carefully and saying meaningful things take effort.

You rarely hear of software being designed too carefully.

And the problem is most of these "ideas" people have no skin in the game. Their own bonus or career doesnt depend on the idea, which is why they are so excited about pushing it onto others

This comment actually suggests a useful question to ask when you find yourself in a situation where a group has decided on something but nobody is acting. Is the task to do:

a) Impossible, like for a mouse to put a bell around a cats neck, or

b) Possible but just not something people want to do.

In scenario (a) you need to move on from the idea, or fundamentally change it. In scenario (b) you can deploy organizational tools to get someone to do it (provide an incentive, force someone, draw straws, share the work etc).

reminds me of High Output Management by Andy Grove: (paraphrasing from memory) if someone isn't doing their job they are either not capable or not motivated

I always thought Bellingcat, the open source intelligence website, had a peculiar name. I didn't know it's origin until now.

I always though CNN Bellingcat had a weird name. It makes more sense now.

> The term has become an idiom describing a group agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task.

My more cynical take has always been that it is about the bravery of the group, cowardice of the individual.

Or, more charitably, the good intentions of the collective that nonetheless fail in practice.

Isn't it both? Imho the relevance to software projects is right on the button

Rationally speaking it's also an economic story.

Oh so thats where bellingcat got their name. Good journalism from those folks, if a but left leaning; would recommend.

Some of the interpretations seem a bit anti-democratic. Some rich lord cat is doing something bad, but it's the fault of the parliament who are only mice and can never hold him back.

If the story ended with a swarm of rats killing the cat then it would be a more positive message, and who benefits from messages that say belling the cat is impossible if not the cats?

That's the disgrace of our times: adapting narratives not to fit reality but to fit our ideologies.

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