No-one knows what they are doing | Hacker News Reader

No-one knows what they are doing

successfulsoftware.net

292 pointscharly357180 comments

This is a very comforting fiction to tell yourself when you’re faced with new and unfamiliar challenges. However, it’s not really true. Plenty of people within an industry or field know enough of what they’re doing because they’ve gone through it before and/or done all of the heavy research to prepare for these situations.

I see the “nobody knows what they’re doing” fiction brought out as an easy antidote for impostor syndrome or as comforting words to people struggling to learn. While intentions might be good, it had an unintended side effect of creating an illusion that expertise doesn’t exist or that everyone’s knowledge is equal regardless of their level of experience.

The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?

The real key is to identify who really knows what they’re doing and to what degree, then leverage those people for advice as much as possible. Going through life assuming everybody is equally incompetent will leave you blind to these huge opportunities to learn from other people’s expertise and experience.

I think a better phrase is "everybody is winging it", because once you get good at something, then you tend to end up working on something that's at the edge of your current understanding, either through promotion or some sense of seniority in the industry.

This isn't necessarily true for all jobs, but I think it's especially true in the software industry. I've been a CTO for 17 years, but I still feel like I'm winging it. It doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing, I have enough experience to make good judgements; but to be the best at something you often have to be on the edge of your understanding at any one point in time.

I don't remember exactly when I realised that everybody is winging it (to one extent or another), but it made it easier to trust my own judgement, it made it easier to push for something I believed in, but it also gave me a sense of how little I still know - which helps me to not get too arrogant about my current abilities.

I'm going to go with "Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily coordinated decisions."

Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it. What I think you realize when you grow up is not every decision or outcome was deliberately thought out and coordinated. Sometimes things just happen. They can even be the result of a collection of individual people who each is highly knowledgeable about their individual contributions with no single person responsible for the ultimate outcome. I'd imagine this is the way something like an automobile is designed.

>A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

Well, sometimes they have to. There is the famous example where a professional concert pianist realizes when the orchestra starts that she practiced the wrong piece. They happen to have been making a documentary, so we get to see her face as she realizes what is happening. And then she "wings it", and manages to play very well anyway.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXnYMl_SuA

I was going to add something about improvisation and jazz. While it’s not planned out you wouldn’t describe them as “not knowing what they’re doing” nor are they just blindly mashing the keys.

They’re feeling their way through a dynamic situation guided by skill, experience and luck.

Really the complete opposite of winging it. Only possible after immense study. And what your seeing is what they are most comfortable playing. They’ll push themselves out of their comfort zone offstage when they aren’t being paid.

That’s not what is normally meant by “winging it” though. That’s applying deep, rigorous expertise, just faster than normal.

This is trully amazing!

>> Not everything is designed, or planned. Sometimes the result is just the sum of a bunch of not necessarily coordinated decisions.

I'll go one further. Almost always. Organizations are basically distributed systems; you theoretically could have fully coordinated decisions with an elegant and efficient network topology (i.e., the decisions involve only those people with relevant information, and don't pass through umpteen unrelated routing layers), but I've yet to see that. Invariably those orgs favoring coordination (CP from a CAP perspective) are slow and inefficient, with too many meetings seeking signoff from stakeholders who have no relevant knowledge or responsibility. The more 'agile' orgs (including suborgs routing around that kind of inefficiency) end up with eventually consistent systems, more AP, and, well, yeah, they're necessarily not coordinated. Hopefully they still have clearly defined areas of responsibility, interfaces, and useful sets of abstraction, but those abstractions are leaky, and the interfaces themselves developed as needs arise.

>Some people know a lot about what they are doing and are highly skilled. A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

If I may torture your example to defend the GP, concert pianists trying to improve will wing it during the steps leading up to the stage: negotiating with a venue, exploring new ways to practice, writing or choosing music pieces, and the all the other tasks unknown to this layman.

I like this take. A lot of times for an experienced team there are multiple solutions to a problem that will work and you can quickly start with the one that seems to best fit the circumstances... if circumstances change (and you'll notice if you've been doing it a while) then you can often (and with some hard work) transition to a different solution and still hit timeline (or immediately warn of the miss). If they team works together well, this happens quickly, if not seamlessly. If you don't have experience, just figuring out which way to start is a huge effort and changing direction even a larger struggle, and you're almost guaranteed to take longer, with higher risk, or worse product.

What I found making a few hundred sourdough loaves over the last 2 years, is that there is a recipe (or several), and you should follow it... but then unexpected things happen (changing starter/temp/gluten, humidity/hydration, forgot something or want to add something, different size loaf or tools/oven, not enough time, missed alarm) and the skill is in knowing quickly what to do and how to work with it to make things right. Rarely do I make what I consider a perfect loaf, because I don't make 100/day every day... but even though I often make one/two mistakes or changes, recovery is automatic and almost imperceptible in the final product.

Ruuning a business is like playing a piano at a concert, except the keys sometimes change position and sometime disappear completely.

I think that’s life, except that sometimes the piano becomes a cello, then a pair of bongo drums.

> A concert pianist doesn't just walk up on stage and wing it.

The concert pianist couldn’t wing it with an oboe, violin or trumpet. But that’s what the full stack dev does. Wing it with this service, that framework, some other language, etc

"Real impostors don't have impostor syndrome"

To me, that is even better.

It means that you care and you are in an uncomfortable zone, which means you are probably growing.

Could it be that the more you know, the more you realise how much more there is to know? That would explain the feeling of impostor syndrome in more senior people - they're judging by different standards.

Thank you. I'm hearing enough things along similar lines to feel odd about it.

So many people wear their impostor syndrome with pride I don't know how to handle it. It's supposed to be ok to have no idea what you are doing. Except it's not. We're living in an era where information is more abundant than ever before. Just read the manual. At least get a basic idea how that library or framework works before putting two lines together. If not for the end result then at least for intellectual pride.

It's probably partly down to age, but it's more and more common and I am uncomfortable.

IMHO, the "don't worry, nobody knows what they're doing" advice, has a sort of "Laffer curve"-esque quality to describe its relative danger (or inverse curve, for utility).

On the lower end of experience/expertise (I acknowledge they're not actually the same thing), it is minimally dangerous and highly useful advice -- in the sense that, it helps lower the barrier to entry for beginners into a field. Making something approachable, is generally worth it, even at the risk of giving beginners undue overconfidence or letting them make early mistakes. Just getting someone to even start (and making it easier for them to stick to something new, and not give up too early because it's hard), is more important than doing "the right thing" (pragmatism > perfectionism)... assuming guardrails exist to prevent beginners from doing fatal damage (not true in all domains).

In the middle range of experience, is where this advice becomes maximally dangerous and minimally useful -- it doesn't just give false confidence, but specifically to those in this range who "know just enough to be dangerous." The advice can become an impediment to learning, if someone comes to believe "I don't need to learn anything more, since no one else knows anything, and therefore nobody can teach me anything." People who get stuck here, are the most dangerous.

At the high end of experience/expertise, the advice actually becomes useful again. The expert can appreciate the dangers of ignorance, while also appreciating the need for them to manage/mentor/guide beginners in the field. Likewise, the expert generally re-learns a certain level of humility, because now that they "know everything there is to know", they also appreciate how little they actually know in the grand scheme of things (e.g. see cosmologists or particle physicists).

I seem to recall some kind of saying, something about how hard and precious/valuable it is, for an expert to be able to re-learn the ability to approach problems with a beginner's mindset, with naive curiosity and unburdened by years of accumulated fears or biases? So anyways, the "nobody knows" advice becomes useful again, and helps experts renew their perspective.

I'm pretty junior in terms of YOE, but I hate when I see people say things like "don't worry, I have no idea what I'm doing and I have x YOE. You're fine!" to people on the internet.

I have a decent understanding of what I'm doing, but I worked for it by doing exactly what you described in your last paragraph and then synthesizing that knowledge into an explicit process.

If you don't know what you're doing you're either bad or don't have a conscious understanding of your process. Both are not good.

Well said! I would add that, I’d you feel you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s a third possibility: you actually do know what you’re doing, in any meaningful sense, but your memory of your past work is dominated by the few cases where there wasn’t a clear right answer, and you made a call you couldn’t rigorous justify, even though you were doing most of the job very competently.

Those situations make it seem like you’re just shooting from the hip/groping in the dark all day … but that belief is wrong.

Either way, the right response to the feeling of impostor syndrome should not be to shrug and say “oh everyone’s like that” (which is how you get the Elizabeth Holmeses of the world); it should be to look for objective heuristics to identify whether you are, in the large, performing competently.

Edit: earlier comment on this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19214749

I sometimes say it for fun, but yeah, it’s weird. I worked very hard over multiple decades to acquire specific sets of skills that are hard to acquire. It’s fun to plunge into something and maybe joke about not knowing what you are doing, but the reality is if you spent as much time as I have and don’t actually know what you are doing that is very sad indeed.

Not to mention that people who say that they don't know what they're doing, but are earning 6 figure salaries are being extremely condescending to everyone else. The idea here is that you get paid for your expertise. If you don't have it, get it!

> The dark side of this mentality is that it creates the same situations whereby people believe their own intuitions are equal to professional scientific research. If you believe no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go, why would you listen to experts instead of inserting your own opinions based on your Facebook research or some quip you saw online?

Well there's a reason to resist this notion on the grounds that knowledge is personal, not transitive. Following John Carmack on twitter does not transfer the ability to design game engines onto me, even though he surely has deep expertise in the area.

My opinions may not be the result of professional scientific research, but that is also true even if I echo the opinions of someone who claims to be a practitioner of such. At least if we accept a definition where justified true belief is necessary for knowledge. Either I know something, or I don't know it. There is no middle ground where I know something by extension of faith in an authority that claims to know it. That's the entire point of science, it isn't doctrinal! The scientific authority may well possess an ability to produce true statements through their knowledge of the topic, but I don't share this knowledge by parroting their true statements; I need to understand why in order to know.

Wrt to imposter syndrome - I often have this feeling, especially since I don't have any formal training in anything IT related.

Recently a kid showed up at work to do an internship. He's studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at even beginning to find the cause of a simple bug in a php application. Incapable of interpreting a bug report, finding the class that serves a certain route etc.

Made me really reconsider my imposter syndrome feelings.

> ... studying computer science, all kinds of advanced algorithm stuff. He's utterly clueless at...

One thing I notice in some rhetoric (not necessarily yours) is the idea that people are static. That if one is clueless now, they'll always be clueless.

People continuously evolve personally and professionally. The road to mastery and understanding always begins with confusion and uncertainty. It's totally reasonable that a student learning complex theoretical material will have a hard time, initially, with the day-to-day grind of doing practical work in a job.

Many workplaces have unreasonable expectations usually framed around the vaguely militaristic notion that their people have to "hit the ground running". It's based on bull. The only way to progress towards mastery is to periodically do stuff that one is "unqualified" for, sometimes that involves failure, re-tries, wasted time, and being seen as incompetent.

So many folks who are now "ninja's", "rockstars", or "10x-ers" started out as clueless newbs who were willing to put themselves out there, make embarrassing mistakes, be called cargo-cult practitioners, and who nonetheless continued with grit. Along the way, some helped and mentored them and others dismissed them.

That's the essence of the issue yes. Learning on the job is considered bad, but learning on the job is how most people learn. So really, we just fake it till we make it[0], and then we start doing what top comment mentions, actually knowing what we're doing.

This is then exaggerated by sayings such as "it takes half a year to get to full speed" in an attempt to either try and lowball learners, or as a defense mechanism as to why society should just cater to the whims of companies so they don't have to carry the risks. Despite the fact most people will be profitable very shortly after they get hired in a job remotely fitting them, if the company has any proper documentation on procedures.

[0]: And this is bad for the more anxious / modest / shy people. "Fake it till you make it" should be good advice, but it doesn't overcome massively inflated "must have but not actually must have" lists discouraging them on the spot, or the hundreds of mismatched job interviews and time wasted. I still don't know who benefits from the status quo aside from middlemen getting jobs that shouldn't realistically exist.

I think the GP’s point is that, despite not having a formal education in CS/CE their self taught skills are pretty good and the formal education doesn’t appear to be teaching computer engineering in any case. So while this intern will probably have a better understanding of how to traverse a tree or w/e, they’re still starting in the same place the the GP did when it comes to actual CE.

Because people don't understand what a CS degree is and what it isn't, and that's assuming most CS degrees are fairly similar (they aren't).

A CS degree isn't a 3-5 year road to understanding the protocols and nuances of webdev. Personally, I was able to choose courses in webdev and took zero of them. I came out of it with zero knowledge of how routing works in practice, even if I could guess it in theory.

What a CS degree is (or at least should be), is a set of courses teaching fundamentals, how to think in logic, solutions and pseudocode, and being able to map this decently well to some language. Which means there's a high guarantee they will pick up the skills necessary on the job.

And yes, I know some people get through degrees without being at least okay programmers. I do consider that a failure of the system.

You're right, it's probably unreasonable to expect them to be able to grasp the day to day grind immediately, it's just that 2 months later he still wasn't able to work independently and we had to spend a lot more time with him than we expected. We assumed he had enough common sense to pick things up quicker.

But no doubt, he's probably smarter than I am and will go further in his IT career.

I was that kid not too long ago. All the classes I took started from first principles, most of my assignments began with an empty file. I had very little experience working with existing code or navigating w an IDE. It was humiliating taking hours to make a one-character change, or getting lost looking for a server endpoint, especially when I expected I should already know what I was doing!

How long do you think it would take someone who has the learning capability to understand algorithms well, to read a bug report?

I find this sentiment very strange. I think you're right that jobs require a different kind of work than they may have previously encountered, I just don't think it's very difficult.

To put it another way, some developers are not smart enough to understand inductive proofs of algorithms not matter how much time they spend, the reverse is not true. Perhaps the individual you know likes to use a lot of academic vocabulary which gives such an appearence.

This is just an honest assessment of one individuals experience. I've heard it myself from my father who was at the top of Europe's largest corporation. He definitely is an expert in his field, but still had a healthy dose of doubt and was clearly honest with himself. Hubris is a far more dangerous imo.

I've been around some very successful people and execs at mature companies and you're sorta right but also so is the title. People with experience have more expertise than most people but they're also just much more comfortable making low-information decisions because they know they'll get away with it most of the time and they can recover from a mistake. There is a common misperception that they know exactly what they're doing when they really just know slightly more than the rest of us and are comfortable being decisive.

Or folks on your own team?

I've got a colleague with over 20 years of software/web/dev experience, working as a contractor on a poorly run team. Routinely there are questions about "how should we do X?".

My colleague has done much of these X situations for 10+ years, and says "we need to do it like Z. I've done Z for 8 years and this is the normal pattern for this scenario".

There's always regular pushback from others on the team with "well, I read $foo which says Z can't scale!" and similar things. These are typically coming from people with ... 1-2 years experience. One guy just graduated high school last year, but the PM gives everyone's views equal weight because "well, no one can know everything, and everyone's got a right to their opinion!"

Just because the 20 year old doesn't know how to do X, or read that Z is 'slow' does not mean their views are equally as valid as someone who has actually done X multiple times over years, and in some cases has already implemented the X on a project.

He's likely not going to be there much longer - he's already splitting time with other projects, and will ramp down if there's not some bigger changes on that team.

This is common, and so is the 1-2 years experience dev churning out a ton of code. It gets work done and builds credibility, but then they make some glaring architectural mistake thats tough to rip out. PM can't see it, and eggs the dev on to keep delivering. Sometimes this is great, sometimes not. Depends on the company and the needs of the tech stack

Further to the point above, the 20 year old in this story does not actually deliver anything. But his protestations about 'slow' and 'legacy' and 'best practices' are like a siren song to some other non-tech folks who keep saying "well, sure, we don't want to be slow - we want to scale - let's do what $person is suggesting". Except... nothing gets done. Months have gone by with no measurable progress, but lots of 'review sessions' identifying $newStackX as the gold standard.

If someone wants to challenge or push back on decisions I make (for example), you better be able to deliver something a) good or b) fast. IDEALLY both, but... if you give me POC code quickly with obvious issues BUT demonstrate some improvement - that's great. We can iterate, if it's quick. Give me some fully fleshed out measurable improvement that takes a bit longer, but has some tests, docs, etc. That's good too.

Sit around and just continually 'back seat dev' on stuff I ship, while literally being incapable of delivering working software of any size, or even supporting your own stuff that you think is 'awesome'... we won't be in agreement on anything.

> no one knows what they’re doing and all adults are just making it up as they go

IMO the most interesting software engineering happens at the edge of the adjacent possible. Where nobody knows what they’re doing. Because it hasn’t been done before. You’re adding net new knowledge to the universe.

Doesn’t even have to be a ground breaking new idea or a completely new technique. It’s already net new if you’re adapting an otherwise well-know solution to a new situation. Or dealing with a unique set of constraints that haven’t been seen before. That’s fun.

But that’s not the same as walking into a thing blind and hoping for the best. You can only do that by relying on a wealth of experience and expert intuition that’s been honed over a long series of smaller challenges.

The optimal situation is to always aim to work at the very edge of your understanding. Not so easy that it’s boring, not so hard that you don’t know where to even begin.

“Expertise” is often less and more valuable than perceived, depending on the situation.

Give me a programming related question and I could have solved it a two decades ago on paper. The expertise allows me to solve it with more efficiency today.

Similarly, there are things that lack of expertise help you with. You can see different perspectives. Have to research the topics fresh (find latest frameworks, etc).

I also think expertise is far more transferable than ever. I hadn’t driving a tractor in 18 years. But I was able to watch a few YouTube videos for an hour, go out and immediately attach equipment, start one up and get to work.

The internet is still amazing. To your point though, there are things I could miss that would get me killed (using a tractor), so a neighbor helped me with some tips after watching; expertise is still very necessary.

>expertise is far more transferable than ever

Small nitpick on this statement that makes a significant difference to me. I think the spirit of what you are saying is that "Experts are far more accessible than ever"

The youtube video that helped you, your neighbor, the instruction manual, are all sources of expert information. In earlier times people would have to find the right book in a library, or travel the world in search of an expert.

You are still trusting experts, which implies that they exist, which is different than assuming "well, some guy on youtube could do it - so it cant be that hard ill figure it out myself". you are instead acknowledging that the "guy on youtube" is an expert that you thankfully have access to because of youtube

Fair enough! You’re correct

I feel like "find latest frameworks" as a positive might get you downvoted here. I get what you mean, unless I don't, in which case.. really?

Just mean you don’t have any preconceived notions

yeah, but, preconceived notions are not necessarily wrong. I think there's a reason why Software companies disrupt each other a lot more than they disrupt other industries. its because of their obsession with the beginner's mind when whole industries have been created and studied for a long time. Sometimes, starting from first principals is a terrible waste of time and capital.

Yes, it also degrades the possibility of getting higher confidence from practice and training.

I can recommend Kathy Sierra's book "Badass - Making your users awesome" on a refreshing perspective on learning, teaching and communication https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24737268-badass

I think this comment is a comforting fiction as well. Of course "no one knows what they're doing" isn't literally 100% true - it's just hyperbole. The essence of the message remains: the vast majority of people only know just enough to survive (and that's okay!). Survive well enough, long enough, and fortune may favor you.

While I agree with most of what you say, I’m almost on a daily basis hit by how clueless many so called tech leads and architects in the field are. A lot of cargo cult programming and blind repetitions of what someone heard on the latest conference.

I think the problem is that people will optimize for a task they are incentivized for. Many people are just incentivized to appear competent enough to get a promotion or some sort of reward: votes for a politician, sales for a salesperson, a promotion for a manager. This means they don't actually have to be competent, they just have to have the appearance of competence to who ever is doling out those awards. These also happen to be the most visible professions. These things combined create the impression that no one knows what they are doing, and everyone is faking it.

On the contrary, I've been inside of institutions that appear to be a bastion of knowledge and expertise, a castle of wisdom and englightment; only to see the stilts that the whole thing is sitting on after entering inside. Having worked in extremely large corporations and government institutions, leading teams and people, auditing suppliers and vendors; it is humbling to see the contrast between external appearance and internal construction.

I like Peter Thiel's take on this:

Between excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism, therein lies human progress.

I see it as coming from 2 different perspectives. One is as you note, an antidote to imposter syndrome ("no one else knows what they are doing so I'm not alone"); the other coming from the opposite perspective: the autodidact who realizes no one around them understands the underlying systems and principles as well as they do, and so is frustrated for the opposite reason.

In software development, a lot of this sentiment gets thrown around to avoid the perception that one's knowledge is somehow gatekeeping others from entering the profession.

This doesn't actually level the playing field, it probably makes it worse because it discourages people from doing the thing that would cause them to get better at software development.

Spend more time developing and less time signaling.

If you really know what you're doing, are you learning anything?

Knowing what you're doing doesn't mean you're omniscient. In an unbounded domain it might mean you have very good intuition for what to do and you're often directionally correct. There's still a lot of room for learning there.

Absolutely. There is a massive spectrum between knowing what you are doing and knowing everything there is to know about a subject. We are all constantly adding to our knowledge base… no matter our starting point.

In addition to the base knowledge is the ability to do something well. I know how to do a lot of home maintenance tasks. Due to a lack of practice, I don’t have the skill to do them all very well.

I don't know by exactly which route I'm going to reach delivery of X project, but I know that I know how to navigate.

The article is specifically talking about starting and running a business, not imposter syndrome in general.

* Except politics.

It's verifiable that no politician can possibly be qualified for whatever they're doing at any point in time as there exists no threshold of experience for doing any job to which they might be assigned and it (at least in democracies) actively ignores experience and selects for pandering.

My theory is that any person running for President (US) has to be narcissistic enough to believe that they should be the most powerful person in the world. Any person who believes that they should be the most powerful person in the world is too narcissistic to be the most powerful person in the world, and thereby by the act of running, should be disqualified.

Do you think of president Zelenskiy of Ukraine is an exception?

Why did you choose him in particular? Do you believe him to be the most capable politician today?

Yes. He certainly shines in the spotlight but maybe that's not how we should judge him.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I spent almost a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, and those politicians who look like they don’t know what they are doing in the media, well, they absolutely know what they are doing. Not only that, but they get advice from a bureaucracy full of well educated, really smart people, who also know what they are doing and have known so for decades. One of the things that struck me going in was just how much people know exactly what they are doing, and, to my own discredit, just how engaged and well meaning those people are. What eventually led me to leave the public sector is that there is a very big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing the “smart/right” thing, especially when you’re held accountable by an entire country, if not the world.

I’ve seen the same sort of thing in the private sector. Once you zoom out enough to understand decisions from the perspective they are being taken from, they very often make perfect sense. That doesn’t mean those very same decisions aren’t a load of bollocks from a lot of perspectives, but they are rarely just “fake it till you make it” sort of deals.

I think this author suffers from childhood delusion in that the author still thinks adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true. There is a lot to be said about figuring things out a long the way, but it’s not like people don’t know what they are doing, because we learn, we adapt and we very often plan ahead. I mean, the author even sort of contradicts the title or the article in the discussion on whether to do more SEO, YouTube, and/or, networking because that is already knowing a lot, just not everything.

A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it. From everything to their careers to raising their children, and I think it’s very easy to see when someone actually doesn’t know, because often they are either drowning, looking for help or both, or, alternatively never even beginning on the thing they want.

> well, they absolutely know what they are doing

My grandfather had neighbours whom he routinely looked down upon because of their alcohol problem.

Very late in the life of one of their children I talked with him and found out he was a really smart guy, knew a lot of IT stuff, 3D design an all, but he simply lucked out in late 90's Romania, used a lot of alcohol and could not pull himself out of it. He died because he was drunk and after loading a wagon of wood for my grandma he struck his head on the pavement. My father insisted he went to the hospital because he has not feeling well but the guy refused. He died a couple of days later because of brain hemorrhage, in his early 50s.

Another guy in the village, a really helpful fellow, you would never believe it by his appearance or demeanor, but he was a retired secret-service officer and used to brief the president.

A female child development therapist that made a bad impression on myself(she seemed fixated on puzzle solving) was later recommended by others as an expert in her field.

So yes, everybody can have a bad day and its really easy to misjudge someone by their appearance.

I’m reminded of when I was in college in Model U.N., there was one guy in the group who presented very socially awkward (his posture made him look like a question mark in profile, he was kind of physically awkward, didn’t participate in the social activities of the club). My senior year, I was the secretary-general¹ of the club. We’d finally let him chair a committee at our annual conference that we held for Southern California high school students. I was walking from committee room to committee room during the conference checking on how things were going and when I looked in on his committee—well, he was totally rocking it. I realized we had squandered his talents for four years because of surface appearances.

⸻

1. The pretentious way that Model U.N. clubs name what’s effectively the president.

I think this largely depends on the definition of "know".

E.g., when I used to work as a doctor in hospital, the last thing I would describe my colleagues as would be incompetent or un-knowing. They all "knew" stuff. Heck, they had to pass stringent exams, and were still accountable to several agencies to ensure being up to date.

The thing is, 50% of what they "knew" was wrong. And if you looked a bit under the surface, what one person "knew" was very different, and often contradicting what the other one "knew", even though they both "knew" stuff. And after many years, I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic, but most doctors seem not to want to admit this, and stick to what they "know" from textbooks instead. This is something I now "know".

And that doesn't even take the whole "is 'know' a binary or fuzzy concept, and if it's the latter, how much 'know' counts as actual 'know'" argument into account to begin with.

So, I hear the argument that "maybe OP is just an impostor projecting their views in a world full of experts" (wildly paraphrasing, obviously), but I also think you're perhaps being a bit too rigid here in discounting that expertise is a relatively fuzzy term.

I appreciate that you are using exageration to make a point, but it's worth noting for the record that iatrogenicity is hardley the number one cause of modern disease. Having a medical problem is a prerequisite to the chance of iatrogenic harm after all. Furthermore, a patient can suffer from iatrogenic harm even if everything was done correctly, and does not imply that someone didn't "know" something correctly.

It is not intended as an exaggeration. Though I fully admit I'm using 'iatrogenic' in the broader sense of "things people do or have done to themselves for the sake of treating or preventing a condition, perceived or otherwise". This includes alternative therapies, over the counter medications, etc. So I fully agree if your perception of iatrogenic was only things like "removed the wrong kidney", then I can see why you might have thought I was exaggerating, since that is indeed pretty rare, and there are safeguards in place for that kind of thing.

The statement is not intended as an attack against the medical professions or the effectiveness of medicine. It is intended as pointing out my observation that, typically, a doctor would list such iatrogenic causes very low on their list of differentials to consider, preferring to consider 'textbook' causes first. However, my own experience (which, is medical, but admittedly "anecdata") is that at present, iatrogenic causes are very relevant, and at least as likely, if not more, to yield a relevant diagnosis compared to textbook stuff in a high proportion of presentations.

A classic example of this is doctors treating symptoms by adding more medication/treatment options, rarely removing medications/treatments that may be causing those symptoms in the first place. Especially if that medication was started by a different specialist. It usually takes several rounds of inconclusive investigations and experimenting with treatments before altering an existing medication is even considered.

At the very least, having a "exclude iatrogenic causes first, before moving on to 'classic' stuff" is a good mindset to have.

> Furthermore, a patient can suffer from iatrogenic harm even if everything was done correctly, and does not imply that someone didn't "know" something correctly.

There's a popular quote often said to medical students when they start: "50% of what we'll be teaching you will have become obsolete or proven wrong by the time you graduate; unfortunately we don't know which 50%.".

Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great at. Otherwise for something like CFS the best resources are CFS communities and a doctor without all the answers, willing to help you explore.

>Doctors are great if you have a problem doctors are great at.

This is tantological- but it has some great depth. I'd like to quote you on this, if I may.

Almost tautological: because it is not “doctors are great at helping with any medical problem”. And by great I don’t mean cure anything, but give the best outcome possible with technology and budget for the person.

> , I've come to the conclusion that the number one cause of modern disease is iatrogenic

Do you have non-anecdotal evidence for this claim? It sounds rather far-fetched.

what is an example of a modern disease whos main cause is iatrogenic

I was also curious, so looked it up on Wikipedia:

> Iatrogenesis is the causation of a disease, a harmful complication, or other ill effect by any medical activity, including diagnosis, intervention, error, or negligence.[1][2][3] First used in this sense in 1924,[1] the term was introduced to sociology in 1976 by Ivan Illich, alleging that industrialized societies impair quality of life by overmedicalizing life.[4] Iatrogenesis may thus include mental suffering via medical beliefs or a practitioner's statements.[4][5][6] Some iatrogenic events are obvious, like amputation of the wrong limb, whereas others, like drug interactions, can evade recognition. In a 2013 estimate, about 20 million negative effects from treatment had occurred globally.[7] In 2013, an estimated 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

I know the word has a definition.

I wanted to know what tpoacher's lived experience and personal observation was to cause him to make the statement.

Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children. But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible, and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a pleasure to read.

They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.

> They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

1. Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.

2. Restated: people scale poorly.

3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.

4. We seem to trend the opposite direction from (3).

> 3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.

Whoa there. There are plenty of very small governments that have plenty of flailing and tyranny. In the limit, if government is just one guy, he clearly won't have clue about 99% of what he's doing, and will be extremely easy to corrupt since he has no-one else to hold him accountable.

If you want to have even a chance of having a competent government you need at least three fully independent branches of government with their own internal systems of accountability.

I could just as easily argue that you need to maximize the size of the government.

The problem is you hit issues both at the small and the large end. It's like goldilocks. You shouldn't minimize or maximize. You should aim at just the right size for the country/region you're trying to govern.

What's WAY, WAY more important is HOW you govern.

What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller. I guess so much time has passed since the various parts of our government was set up that we've kind of forgotten why the government is the way it is.

Not that we shouldn't have a process that trims down parts of government that has become redundant. But we should have a deep understanding of the problem that part of the government is solving before doing so.

> What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller.

And what’s really really scary is how many people, at least in the US, worry about government being too small when in reality it has been almost monotonically growing since the 1960s. Non defense federal spending as a share of GDP is bigger than the 1960s. And state and local government spending has grown twice as fast as GDP since 1960.

I think people confuse Reagan’s rhetoric with the reality that Democrats controlled the House, and thus spending bills, his entire presidency. The Reagan era was a period of government retrenchment in the same sense as Biden is the second coming of FDR.

As with other things, quality matters more than quantity. A village elder or city mayor are just as fallible as a parliament, or a king and his council. The mechanism of corruption may vary with historical circumstance, culture, and/or technology. But at the end of the day, if the "people in charge" are unaccountable and have no desire to exercise their power for the common good, there is no system of checks and balances that will save such a government from collapse.

> What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller.

You said "solve". I said "minimize". Details matter, boss.

> the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.

I've seen about 220 'orgs' from the outside in, interviewed a few thousand people in those orgs and have done the write up on the state of affairs. I've yet to find a single example that would support this claim, where did you get this from?

Personal observation of Congress.

>Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein

That seems like a very bold premise to me.

Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of ill thought out decisions. To such a degree that the people in charge of it are either dumb or have ulterior motives. Having worked with bureaucrats as an external consultant and as someone that provided information to the answers for minister questions, I have a much different opinion of our dear bureaucrats.

They might be smart, but it has no impact on the quality of their work. Right or wrong, good or bad, non of that has any bearing on how they do their work. They want to get stuff done. Without getting in any political trouble. In a way that can be claimed as a win (if it actually is a win is immaterial).

> Well digitalization in Denmark is an absolute train wreck of ill thought out decisions.

Yes, and it’s also competing with Estonia at being the best in the world.

One of the things that burned me out was actually the poor decision making, from my technical point of view mind you. I’ll simplify what I mean by a made up example of a platform selection process. Your organisation needs a headless CMS, your external consultants tells you this, your tech staff tells you this and even your friends from competitors that you network with privately tell you this. The issue is that your company strategy is to rely as little on internal IT resources as possible, and any available headless CMS (because you can’t outhouse the data) requires technical talent. So what do you do? Well, you pick something else, like Wordpress, the Microsoft powerplatform or similar, and you do fine. The solution is shit technically, but it also works good enough while achieving its primary strategic goal within your organisation.

Public sector digitalisation is that, except a billion times more complicated and with the added bonus of having changing political leadership. For a few years we had a designated minister in Sophie Løhde, who setup a branch of the digitalisation ministry to build a cross sector national enterprise architecture inspired by the one they run in the municipalities (KL) called rammearkitekturen. The group had an extreme amount of talent and improved on the 20 years of KL work so much it was like the whole thing went from the stoneage to the spaceage in less than a year. Then Sophie Lødhe got a different job, the task force was disbanded and everything related to governance went back to the municipalities (KL and KOMBIT) whom through out the process had suffered from an extreme inability to kill their darlings.

I mean, that’s just a glimpse of it, but you don’t have to work with other European countries for very long until you relive just how awesome digitalisation is in Denmark by comparison. Part of my current job is dealing with the fact that FTP is still a very common data transfer channel in Germany and France, and I didn’t miss that S in SFTP, because that’s something even massive tech companies that shall remain unnamed hadn’t heard about until I asked them why it wasn’t encrypted.

Sometimes the idea is to do things wrong and then use that experience to do things correctly later and if possible use events to sweep aside the current political order.

Here we run into the philosophical question of what it means to "know what you are doing".

On the one hand people may have the best of advice and make decisions that are extremely clever in a specific context. And on the other the world is fundamentally too chaotic - the most important factors are generally unknowns or unanticipated.

The author is not talking about the same standard. "Knowing what you're doing" means that you're familiar with a situation and you know exactly the correct course of action. This is not the case for most things in adult life (especially politics), in which every problem is a new problem, for which you use heuristics to converge to a solution, that isn't perfect, but at least tries something out.

I also prefer your comment to the post. The most successful people in business I know are very bright and hard workers. I like the fact that the writer of the original article is showing some humility. I don't think we should signal however that anyone can succeed in business by bluffing it. I say, have a go at business but don't give up the day job if you can't afford it.

They know what they are doing in their immediate context, they follow the rules of their bureacuracies but have no idea nor possible idea of the consequences of their policies. And their being "well-meaning" has a very narrow scope limited to their immediate social and economic class.

> A more accurate way to view the world would be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans, but almost every successful adult I have ever met did have both a plan and a genuinely good idea on how to execute it.

Yes, absolutely. I think there is a specific niche of motivational "you can do it!" stuff which basically boils down to "everyone is winging it, so fuck it", and it's dishonest. Few hard things are achieved with this attitude, even if sometimes it's true that you improvise a lot.

Beautifully written post by the way, it really nails down some major points that I find more motivational than the original post.

Another one I’ve seen is interpreting the statement “if you have an imposter syndrome, you can’t be an imposter” as “if you feel like an imposter, you can’t be an imposter”. I’m sure that approach can have the effect of temporarily helping someone’s self-esteem, but it’s based on highly questionable reasoning.

I’ve been fairly close to the digitalisation agenda in UK public sector, and apart from pockets, I find it hard to be so generous.

Horrible outsourcing deals with the usual suspects and enormous failed programmes are still the default.

Reading the parent comment about Denmark made me sad. I feel that in the UK we have smart, dedicated, well intentioned people just like Denmark, but if the NHS RiO system and Track-and-Trace are anything to go by we are plagued by massive corruption in the IT sector.

This is the country of Alan Turing, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Acorn RISC Machines. We need a new broom on public IT. I think we also need an outright ban on using Microsoft and other Big Tech contracts and a policy to rebuild skills and bring them back in.

One of the most disgraceful episodes of late was the UK basically outsourcing our whole intelligence show to Amazon. Our corrupt minister Priti Patel sold out MI5/6/GCHQ. For over a year she has refused to answer questions on the decision, her connections and kickbacks.

FWIW, I've done some work in the UK public sector, including but not limited to the NHS.

In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-house, the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground engineers) were some of the smartest, most motivated individuals I've worked with, who pretty consistently gave great output (for e.g., shipping products, system design, software architecture, balancing tech debt with delivery velocity) in the face of almost uniformly painful obstacles, like the tooling they could work, or being jerked around by changing political priorities.

OTOH, any time the tech folks were a long-term outsourced arrangement, you could expect to find (WITHOUT EXCEPTION) ridiculous amounts of cruft, hacks and frankly unacceptable shortcuts in the tech systems and interfaces, and the few people of this ilk that I did deal with, were entirely focussed on Goodhart's Law-ing their way to their next gig. (TBH, I can't really blame the individuals as they're merely responding in the most rational manner to their incentives).

> I think we also need [...] a policy to rebuild skills and bring them back in.

Absolutely 100% agreed, but I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite leadership/management abilities to be able to do this in a manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs to politically connected mates.

P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader app that I use.

> In my experience, any time the tech folks were in-house, the "doer class" (i.e. the boots-on-the-ground engineers) were some of the smartest, most motivated individuals I've worked with

Lions led by donkeys as they used to say.

> I suspect we lack the political will/vision, and the requisite > leadership/management abilities

I'll differ a little here. I think we can have capable people at all levels and I am generally confident in the UK to come through in the end. We can do good leadership too. The reason the donkeys won't carry their load is that they're corrupt, undisciplined and disloyal. They're there to serve us but we forget who holds the stick.

> manner that doesn't just result in the next round of useless bungs > to politically connected mates.

Precisely. My guess is Nick Clegg and Priti Patel are the tip of a gargantuan iceberg. We're becoming a vassal state to the third richest "nation state" on Earth [1], because they have our politicians in their pockets.

[1] The combined wealth of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Facebook now places them collectively above Russia as the number three "superpower". https://www.wired.co.uk/article/big-tech-geopolitics

> P.S.: Entirely off-topic -- do you compose your replies in Emacs or something like that? Or at least resort to using semantic line breaks? (https://sembr.org/) I ask because your comment looks fine on the website, but shows line breaks after sentences in an HN reader

Yes, Emacs, Well spotted. Yet another fingerprint to watch for! :)

RiO isn't an NHS product, it's made by Servelec who sell it to some NHS organisations. Yes, it's terrible.

https://www.servelec.co.uk/product-range/rio-epr-system/

I think the bigger problem is the consultancies and system integrators.

The government sign huge outsourcing which propose large, expensive, long waterfall style projects with outdated architecture etc.

Time and time again these programmes fail, but the government money just keeps on flowing.

The bureaucrats one has to deal with as taxpayer, insuree, petent, or immigrant are different kind of bureaucrats from those holding high positions and advising to them. That's how one gets idea that they don't know what they're doing, they job is to push you away, hold you back. The second kind though... yes it takes enormous volume of cunningness, insight, non-public information to acquire and expand position of power.

Yes I agree, that it is easy to assume people are not clever but you only have to see most Politicians after they leave Government to hear how (usually) perceptive, articulate and intelligent they are - which presumably is how they convinced people to vote for them.

However, Government is like a big corporation with extreme levels of power and corruption in every country. It is also largely unique in that the Prime Minister/President can't just get rid of people they don't like or are not very good at their job, the voters recruited them! So then you balanbce priority, idealism, party politics, saving-face, money, making yourselves look powerful to the world, trade agreements and loads of other things. To be fair, it is remarkable we get anything useful out of it.

> be that most people don’t know exactly how they are going to execute their long term plans

That’s “not knowing what you’re doing” and not really different from “fake it until you make it” either.

If you don’t have a really concrete plan to achieve a certain goal, you quite literally don’t know what you’re doing.

"Fake it until you make it" involves bluffing and deception. Which is very different to asserting that we are all just muddling along, doing the best we can.

> adults are supposed to have the answers for everything, which isn’t true

That's the gist of all of it. No one knows what are they doing because the adults actually don't have all the answers, on the other hand smart people know what they want to achieve and they have idea and a plan for it and simply try their best. They know what are they doing in the context of their understanding, idea and desires, it's just that their understanding and ideas have limits.

I agree with you. One other point I would like to make is that it seems a lot of decisions are made after a lot of fatigue-inducing processes, which just seem to lead to a lot of compromises nobody really wants, but that also no one wants to rebuke, since the process to arrive to the decision was already too drawn-out.

The person drowning looking for help can become the person in the know with a plan. Easy to forget we were all babies once and learned everything from others. Attitude of course makes a difference. So does luck.

Ex-British politician, Rory Stewart, said that (paraphrasing from memory) that every time he started to understand about a ministerial appointment, he would get promoted to another department.

Danmark vs Britain. From what I read occasionally in Dominic Cumming's blog, Boris isn't particularly good at using the bureaucracy.

Not to defend Johnson, but DC has an axe to grind.

Absolutely true, the most realistic post about business that I've red in time

you are complaining about Boris, you have to see here in Spain to Pedro Sanchez, it's a completely mess

Given even just Johnson’s COVID history — banned unnecessary gatherings under penalty of fines with a large publicity campaign, attended at least eight of the at least sixteen unnecessary gatherings at No. 10 (including his birthday and a Christmas party), caught COVID and almost died from it, repeatedly asserted that there had not been any party and that if that no rules wrote broken, was fined for breaking the rules, and still hasn’t resigned — I dread to think what you have in mind for Mr Sanchez.

first world problems. lol

What's this fuss about parties and rules? If these are biggest issues you worry about, then your country is being run by some very good politicians who ensured that there are no other bigger problems for you to worry about.

That's an interesting take on subverting the rule of law. Most law breaking in Western Democracies by first ministers is probably not as obvious?

Johnson also, with the help of the Queen, unlawfully prorogued (ie ended the session of) parliament in order to avoid democracy acting against him.

He lost two previous jobs for lying (in politics and journalism; you have to try really hard to lose a post for lying in either occupation it seems). Apart from his handlers I can't see how anyone would employ him for any role.

He's very bright, his team manipulate the news/news cycle in similar way to Trump, and it's documented fact that he purposefully plays the fool.

That the UK government basically knew what they were doing may have been true 5 years ago. Today, not so much.

Do you think? They're starting to cut into our human rights, and workers rights, they've brought in measures to stop democratic protests, stripped public services, they've increased tax on the poor and removed tax from business/rich (cutting tax on Champagne whilst lecturing the populace on the need for austerity was a particularly evil-villain twist); they straight up funneled £Billions out of the Exchequer under the guise of PPE payments and then just said that the whole scandal want going to be investigated, they clearly had arrangements with the Met to allow them to avoid the law ... they seem to be doing exactly what they intend, making oodles of money.

They removed EU oversight and loaded top civil service positions with yes-men.

They've achieved a lot, all to the detriment of the country and regular people. What makes you say they don't know what they're doing?

I don't disagree with any of the above. But it is probably at least as much down to incompetence as greed. Please don't try and tell me that Nadine Dorries is some sort of evil genius.

I had very different experiences.

I worked for an acronym company in which the majority of "leaders" were smart, driven, capable, and despite mistakes that anyone can make, it would have not been fair to call them incompetent.

Some were incompetent, they got promoted into positions of responsibility and power when the company was scaling up so fast that they could not hire externally for those positions fast enough, and the internally vetting was weak. Then, they created their "network of power" within the company and they went on working incompetently for a few years. And then there were people like my former boss who are idiots with an academic title of some weight. Many such cases.

I then worked for a huge company, but not an acronym one, and at the Director/VP/C- level there are pockets of incompetence that are difficult to explain to others and to accept as possible.

CTOs that know little about technology, VPs that ask LinkedIn for surveys of employer retention to make the case that they were not losing more people in a year than, say, Google, but not accounting for the fact that we could not hire anyone for months while Google is so worried about false positives that they reject plenty of very viable candidates. The same slides presented at each all-hands meetings not to reinforce the vision or goals, but because they are too lazy to prepare new slides for an audience of 500 people, who looked at themselves asking: again?

One might say that they are competent at navigating company politics, which is like saying that the employee sleeping with their bosses are competent at getting promotions.

When I worked in academia (not in the US, if that matters), there were plenty of tenured professors that I would say were in the bottom 5 or 10% in terms of competence, research plans, management of students and postdocs, when compared to all postdocs in the same research area. Useless professionals that schemed their way through academia. And everybody knows that, but people who are inside have nothing to gain by exposing them, and people who leave academia they say, well, not my problem anymore, f them.

In my home country, the vast majority of politicians are incompetent outside of their core competence, which is getting votes.

I was under the impression, when I was younger, that I was wrong whenever I saw someone in a position of power, be it in the private sector or public office, who I saw as incompetence. How is it possible, I was asking myself, that somebody can get promoted, assigned huge responsibilities, be accepted by their peers when they are not at their level or at the level of competence required by their position. But it is very possible and in reality quite frequent.

>>> when you're held accountable by an entire country...

This is blatantly untrue.

Heck, the infamous trifecta Bush-Blair-Aznar led their countries on a war that destroyed a country and costed many human lifes, based on what we know were lies and invented data. What consecuences did they face?

And that's just an example. I can show you as many corruption cases as you want, and see how the subjects go on with their careers untouched.

OP wasn't saying that all people are always held accountable for all of their actions but the Iraq war caused a massive problem for Labour at the polls that they never really recovered from. Also, the incessent onslaught of media vultures trying to stir trouble for a headline will certainly make it harder for people to make decisions that they believe to be right because most people won't understand all of the variables and will cause massive criticism.

Until we are front page news for being "naive", "stupid", "arrogant", "monster", we can't really understand the pressure that Governments are under.

Some people do, but they're the minority, and you might not even notice them in the crowd.

I've seen well over a hundred organisations, small and large, in my careers as a consultant. They're all run by the 90% that have no idea what they're doing. They're chair warmers. Paper pushers. Project mismanagers.

Then there are the 10% that keep the lights on, put the fires out, have the brilliant ideas, and keep science and society progressing.

Generally they're under-appreciated and under-paid. Sometimes they're not noticed at all. That doesn't mean they don't exist!

Someone figured out all of the amazing things that you take for granted in your life. The x-ray lasers use to make your iPhone. The 5G protocol that lets it get gigabits while you're standing at a bus stop. The encoding that lets you stream your own personal "TV channel". The chemistry that made up the OLED panel that is bright enough to see in sunlight. On and on...

Companies... including startups... are like this. There are the 90% that just keep treading water, and then there's the 10% that push the boundaries.

I guess if everybody were pushing the envelope, things would get unstable quickly. Humanity survives on a lot of dumb grunt work.

I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.

Blast from the past! I used PerfectTablePlan for our wedding, tweaked by the far superior ‘do what your better half tells you’ algorithm. We used the same approach later when naming our first child, I built a complicated machine learning system to learn what names and sounds we liked, then we settled on my wife’s first choice.

The thing I’ve learned in life (and especially in sports analytics where variance can dominate) is that “knowing what you’re doing” isn’t any number of instances where you got something right first time. It’s having a process (or even a process-creating-process!) that you’re willing to stand by even when individual results don’t work out. The question isn’t “would you do it all again, knowing what you know now?” it’s “would you learn the same way in the future?” I think being open about this with kids is pretty helpful.

This second paragraph is consistent with advice from a piece on HN about a month ago, describing how playing poker can make us better at life. And one of the key principles was being process oriented.

I dont know why this is getting so much hate, I agree with it.

Engineer types want everything to be neat and tidy, well planned and thought out. But this doesn't work in the business world, which is messy and chaotic. If you can't live with th chaos, starting a business is a bad idea. (And I say as someone who had failed to start a profitable-compared-to-day-job business)

I agree. It's true for many things in life.

I don't think surgeons are winging it, at least in the operating room, but in life the majority of things are chaotic and unpredictable. Specially running a business.

s/business/kids/ and it is also true!

Not true at all at things that need practice and that are recurrent.

From sports, to many other activities that have repetition, people know what they are generally trying to do. That doesn't mean that there is not a large degree of randomness, and some improvisation. Eg:

1. A penalty kicker knows what he/she is trying to do. Power over placement, what corner they want to shoot it, etc. They have practiced many times. Same with the goalie. The goalie will try to guess, left, right, center, etc...

They have practiced this many time as well. Both parties know what they are doing (at a professional level), yet there is always a degree of randomness, and improvisation.

2. A cop knows that in some corner it is much easier to catch people that are speeding, and they can give tickets easy.

3. A dentist has seen a root canal many times, and it is easy for him/her to just fill another one. All teeth are different, yet they are similar at the same time. Practice makes perfect. First time doing a root cannal, or an extraction must be tough/nerve racking. 10th time, a bit easier. 100th time, just another routine day.

Anyways... but these type of articles are really good feel good articles.

If the goal is clear, and the rules are clear, the knowing-what-to-do-level can be relatively high. As an example, a typical game can be won with executing on the set rules with skill. You can measure the success of your actions by looking at the outcome. This seems so obvious that I don't think the author would argue against it.

I think what the author is talking about is the space where things become so complex that it's hard to attribute any action to the outcome or, even worse, you can't even realistically measure the outcome.

Applying this to your penalty kicker: Sure, you practice, you get better. But so does everyone else. The question then is: How and what to get better than the other guys? Why does one guy succeed and the other doesn't? Yeah sure, because they hit the ball in such a way that it enters the designated space – but how do they set themselves up to accomplish that? How many of the 24 hours you have in a day do you spend kicking the ball from the penalty point? How much of it is recovery? When do you get up? Planing and theory? Mental strength exercises? Food intake? Massages, strength or balance workouts?

The failure is simply defined: You did not hit the ball in such a way that it entered the goal. Sure – but why? How do you adjust your routine in such a way that next time it's going to be better, relative to everyone else, who is also trying to improve?

In reality it's obviously more complex even still, because there is no "penalty kicker" in football. So to become the best possible soccer player, how much of your time should be allocated to penalty kicking at all? And then how does your penaltykickability scale while working on the other stuff that you are also looking at?

And then, when we are exiting game space, it gets really complicated, because all of a sudden it's not even clear what winning even means. In soccer a win is neatly defined. It's usually not the case in the real world. Is it a win to provide health care to all? Is Bitcoin a win for humanity? Is it a good goal to get people out of poverty or is the goal something else and we trust that this will be a side effect of that goal? You and I might agree on an answer, and then there is millions or billions of people who don't, in theory or at least in practice.

It's messy stuff.

I don't think running a business is anything like kicking penalties. So many more variables and unknowns.

Can you remember when you first started to read? Doubtless you thought that some day you would find in books the truth, the answer to the very puzzling life you were discovering around you. But you never did. If you were alert, you discovered that books were conventions, as unlike life as a game of chess. The written word is a sieve. Only so much of reality gets through as fits the size and shape of the screen, and in some ways that is never enough. . . . Most of the real difficulty of communication comes from social convention, from a vast conspiracy to agree to accept the world as something it really isn’t at all.

Literature is a social defense mechanism. Remember again when you were a child. You thought that some day you would grow up and find a world of real adults — the people who really made things run — and understand how and why things ran. . . . Then, as the years went on, you learned, through more or less bitter experience, that there aren’t, and never have been, any such people, anywhere. Life is just a mess, full of tall children, grown stupider, less alert and resilient, and nobody knows what makes it go — as a whole, or any part of it. But nobody ever tells.

Henry Miller tells. Andersen told about the little boy and the Emperor’s new clothes. Miller is the little boy himself. He tells about the Emperor, about the pimples on his behind, and the warts on his private parts, and the dirt between his toes. Other writers in the past have done this, of course, and they are the great ones, the real classics. But they have done it within the conventions of literature. They have used the forms of the Great Lie to expose the truth.

/ Kenneth Rexroth.

See, that will all make sense when I am older
So there’s no need to be terrified or tense
I’ll just dream about a time
When I’m in my age of prime
‘Cause when you’re older

Absolutely everything makes sense

- Olaf the Snowman, Frozen 2

What people know is just practical knowledge of their immediate surrounding and a bit of theoretical models of what is outside. If by "knowing what they are doing" you mean deep understanding of everything from the big picture then it's impossible. Doing your own local stuff as good as possible is the best we can get and it usually works reasonably well. Until we get a dictator in an information bubble, but well that's just life.

That's not quite true. There is a difference between e.g. making a really nice design "as good as possible" but producing something that is not best-practice, doesn't solve the problem well, isn't a standard look for whatever it is that you are designing.

There are many people who at least think they are working hard and well but the piece that is missing is the context that the work needs to fit into and the ability to evaluate it. There are a gazillion different ways to do marketing (and to do it "well") but most of those will either have little or no effect in a certain context so the true person who knows what they are doing knows the landscape, knows the costs, knows the trade-offs and knows how to measure success.

I agree with the sentiment that adults are much better at projecting confidence than actually knowing what the heck they are doing or even making smart decisions.

The advice of just founding a company without a plan? Not so much....

I don't know who said it but "Failing to plan is planning to fail, however, no war was ever won by planning alone".

In other words, most of business (as well as life) is both strategic and tactical. My strategic plans are needed because things take time and investment and we need a direction to give assurances. However, things change every day and the tactical side is working out how to deal with those.

I certainly think adults are better at projecting confidence but I also think as you grow older, you are more likely to be realistic about how messy things are.

I call this the hyper-competence fallacy: the mistaken idea that some group of people (usually the ones in charge) are consistently and significantly more likely to have their shit together than the median person. I've met extremely smart people, and extremely competent people, but they were only smart at certain things, and only sometimes. They still made lots of mistakes, even basic ones.

Some people are certainly better at their jobs than others, but that you shouldn't just assume that the people in charge are right without thinking things through and raising your hand to ask questions.

Much more common are the people who are typically incompetent, but who manage to make people think they know what they're doing. People want to believe somebody knows the way. It can be hard to spot incompetent leaders until it's too late, which is all the more reason to be politely skeptical of anybody who acts like they aren't playing catch up most of the time.

Of course, it depends on the context. As a casual chess player, it's fine that I don't really know what I'm doing, and that I'm apt to be roundly beaten 7 times out of 10. There are no consequences to being bad at chess, except for feeling a bit sad if I lose too many games in a row.

As a senior DBA, it is absolutely unacceptable if I do not know what I am doing. I look after software which runs a fairly important part of the machinery of government. There is not much tolerance for incompetence in my little niche, although granted that no-one dies if I get it wrong, the consequences for the end-consumers of my little bit of the world can be life-changing.

Same applies (in a more important sense than just DBA work) for e.g. paediatric heart surgeons, rail drivers, airline pilots, people whose incompetence can kill. Skill and professionalism are very much key, and cannot be hand-waved away with platitudes to make people feel better about their own inabilities.

A valid point, I think the sentiment is more common in the development world because things change so fast you can't really master the entirety of even a very specific domain for very long.

However, it seems IT over time has grown to be (or aim to be) "incompetence proof". That is, even if you mess up, there should be mechanisms in place to prevent a catastrophe, so that at least two people must be majorly incompetent to create a disaster. I guess we call it redundancy.

Compare with medecine, if your doctor is bad you can die. And people frequently do. I tend to prefer our base assumption that everyone is incompetent, that way we're prepared when someone makes a mistake.

I stopped reading the original article when the OP started including politics.

Invoking anger by reminding your audience that some 'current' government of $random_country that they are not 'having a clue' is a really cheap trick to grab attention of lesser informed people. Of course it only applies to the 'current' government, because everything was obviously better in the past.

It makes me sad, and angry at the same time to see that even on forums like HN, people fall for it. This thread is mostly hijacked by a 'discussion' about politics, completely ignoring the subject of the OP.

What's even more sad, is that if you look at the 'social proof' section of perfecttableplan (the company the author is promoting, and where he is CEO), you'll see that they serve loads of government organizations. So here is the 'CEO' of a company, making cheap shots at their own customers, just to get some eyeballs on his content marketing.

It is a pointless piece of writing. It says nothing. It's a thinly veiled advert for OP's software, clickbaited by a unprovable political opinion. This type of thing should be removed from HN.

There is a kind of subtle clickbait title style well suited for the HN audience and this article had it. Appealing to intellectual curiosity to read more, promising something like a PG essay but not delivering anything like that. It is the one weird trick of the HN world.

Why is this so far up on hacker news? It's 3 paragraphs of groundless whining and self-promotion with absolutely no substance.

Give me a second, let me check the "reason" field next to each upvote in the HN database real quick.

To save you writing the DB query: I sometimes upvote based on the discussion itself.

because it's attacking the tories

> When I was a child I assumed that all the adults running the world knew what they were doing. Now that I am an adult, I am under no such illusions. Just look at the current British government. They clearly don’t have a clue. A more mediocre bunch of individuals would be hard to find.

I remember viewing an interview with John Cleese, and he said almost exactly the same thing.

I feel as if I have a "heuristic" for life, as opposed to "rules." It helps that whole "making up as we go along" thing.

I like this post a lot, and I can certainly relate to this working in the business technology sector as a developer and as a generalist technology consultant for a large firm. Contracts get signed, and half the time, the seller doesn't understand what they're selling, and the buyer is buying an idea and truly doesn't get it either, then it's up to the technical consultants to take their best stab at it while being billed out as an "expert."

Then you have professions that are much more black and white, mainly the trades and non-technology engineering. Their survival is contingent on knowing what they're doing, most of the time and they gain more profit by being efficient with tasks they've seen time and time again. Think of a plumber or garage door repairman whose seen your specific problem hundreds of times before. A good tradesperson will know precisely what they are doing.

I'm not sure where I'm going with these rambles, but the encouraging view of what the author is writing about here can almost be described as embracing uncertainty in the business world where the rules aren't clearly defined. Much different than the trades or non-tech engineering, where the end deliverable is something that is more concrete (no pun intended) and easily understood by the average person.

People know what they're doing the second and third time that they launch the same product.

Like when you see founders of large VC backed companies go off to launch the same thing.

Or why business practices calcify and people aren’t open to a new theoretically efficient process, they have already failed at so many other things that they don't want to risk again. Its not arbitrary why people become this way, there is a lot of crap out there.

Even if you are launching a near identical product a second time, the market, staff and technology will be different. You can't stand in the same river twice (Heraclitus).

Why can't I hire the same people, use the same technology, and sell to the same market? This is basically the story of a lot of small business owners; they learned from somebody and then applied that for their own. If I only make 50% of what the previous company made but own 5x as much, it might look like a failure to some but net I am better off.

I think the problem needs to be thought through separately for individuals and for organisations.

For individuals -- yes, no-one knows what they are doing. Most people, including successful ones, are too embarrassed or insecure to admit this. The world is divided into ones that understand this and ones that do not.

For organisations -- no, that is not true. Some organisations accept the above limitation and rather than ignore it, try to build systems that take it into account. My company does this -- CEO knows this, senior leadership knows this, we are working together accepting our individual limitations and trying to find ways to work around them. We hate internal politics and put premium on being honest about problems or capabilities.

Unfortunately this does not seem to work for governments. Governments is all about politics, all about image. It is not fundamentally incompatible with being honest about ones limitations but in practice very close to being so.

If you accept the adage “the greater my sphere of knowledge, the greater my contact with the unknown” (I do), you can see how the author’s sentiment exists even as we age and even grow in wisdom and knowledge.

One of my realizations is that it’s harder to telegraph what you don’t know than what you do know. It’s easy to see that older people have journeyed the paths were on, and seem to “know what they’re doing.” In reality, what they know (to some degree) is what we (the less traveled) are experiencing. But they, having thought they were coming to the end of their journey, have found their is yet more to learn and sometimes pop up in moments like this to exclaim “guys, this journey just keep going! I still don’t know! Acquisition of knowledge and experience has no end game!” It’s humbling.

Great adage. It's from David Christian in Origin Story: A Big History of Everything, but really it's just a paraphrasing of Einstein, who compared knowledge to a circle, and referred to the circumference of darkness, rather than the unknown.

I know what I'm doing, I just don't always know how to do it. But I know how to find out, and I have the mental framework to pick it up quickly. That's what juniors should understand about how this works. You'll never know everything, but you should know how to know.

Actually people do know what they're doing. They're simply making decisions with incomplete and/or probabilistic data. They want to make decisions maximizing the most likely scenarios while minimizing the most negative outcomes. That's why it's called a balancing act and there's various techniques one can utilize for making decisions in such an environment.

This is a reason why many businesses fail. Sure, just about everybody can make good decisions if you have accurate and complete data with which to make those decisions. That just doesn't typically happen too often when running a business. It's a far cry though from saying "nobody knows what they are doing." That's just simply not true.

I think realizing this was the biggest disappointment of my adult life. As a kid, you think that there are people looking after the world, looking out for the best interests of society, etc. When you get enough and can see behind the curtain, it's very depressing.

I think it's not depressing but wonderful. All software sucks, nobody knows what they're doing, etc, yet the world keeps chugging along and there's all these incredible things to do, amazing foods to eat and marvels of technology to play with. Imagine if we actually knew what was going on! Rather than feeling depressed that there's nobody with an actual plan, why not be amazed that all these things can come out of such chaos?

The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.

Marcus Aurelius

Good advice. A moral oft repeated in stories. They said it well in Kung-Fu Panda: there is no secret ingredient.

I remember as a junior developer caring a ton about programming but constantly feeling like my skills weren't up to par. I read some quote from Ray Bradbury about how he wrote for 10 years before he created anything he himself liked. I mulled over that idea and it gave me hope. Years later I am now writing code that I think is good. Hopefully more than the senility kicking in.

Having worked many places and looked at various technical solutions developed and used, I can understand where the author is coming from. Many things work and get the job done, but it's clear that the creators had little knowledge about how to solve the problems they solved from a mere technical know-how perspective.

I read him as don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it.

"don't think you need to know everything about something to start doing it" is probably a more accurate title, but less snappy. Also it doesn't hurt for the title to be a bit polarizing. ;0)

Agreed that this is a thing, but this is not what the article is about. Running a business and having software engineering prowess are two different problem areas.

I know, it was just an example of the same in another area.

Sounds like a complete lack of recognition for expertise, specialization and experience. Same attitude that leads people to distrust science.

I think the classic scene from Armageddon can sum-up this feeling pretty well. https://youtu.be/qk9MK5smzVE?t=397 "Couldn't read the plans right and did a piss-poor job of putting it together."

The pilot flying your airplane would disagree.

The chefs cooking your meals at restaurants would disagree.

Your surgeon would definitely disagree.

I could go on.

"No-one knows what they are doing"

Thanks. I'll tell my boss and let you know how my performance review goes...

The Gervais Principle shows up every once in a while on Hacker News and seems relevant:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Competent Elites:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-...

That's when "you don't know what you are doing" that you can do your best work. If you know what you are doing all of the time, it means you are not learning new things.

小孩子可能会以为成年人都知道要干什么，但成年之后才知道这个世界其实是草台班子，绝大多数人对正在做的事情没有任何头绪的。经营企业同样如此，人们所总结的成功企业经营之道都是后见之明，成功企业其实并不清楚每个阶段需要干什么。如果你想创业，不要为不知道要干什么而放弃。因为没有人真正知道。

I know what I'm doing - and oftentimes what I'm doing is figuring out something I don't know.

This is what Jordan Peterson refers to when stating that Postmodernist claim about reality having an infinite number of objects that can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways is a fair valid claim.

And nature, somehow, made us evolve with the machinery optimized to adapt to a finite number of interpretations.

Hence, our cognitive machinery is made up of "Maps of Meaning" that with a finite number of meanings, make feasible for us to navigate the infinite sea of ignorance of what we can't make a sensical meaning of.

> Most of us who are running businesses had no real idea what they were doing when they started

Who are they?

i too as a child thought the grownups knew what they were doing. I decided that my ignorance about all things would make for a great opportunity to imagine how i would organize all things. Unbothered by previous art i could have original ideas all the way!

big mistake, the grownups didn't know, they didn't want to know.... wtf

only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. .. -socates

only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” -socrates

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