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Horrible

randsinrepose.com

86 pointsllimllib16 comments

This article finally made me understand why I don't always learn from Rands' essays: he's not a detail person.

When he talks about technical stuff - the Free Electron, Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder - I'm nodding along and he's explaining a ton of reasons for phenomena that I had noticed but didn't understand.

When he talks about manager stuff - I'm the boss for now, What to do when screwed - I don't get it. Because I have only just started doing some management, I can't fill in the blanks of most of the situations he's talking about because I haven't experienced them as a manager.

So, he's kind of like one of those automap things in a computer game - you can see the structure and reasoning to your journey and experiences, but only once you've fucking got there.

I was about to write a snarky comment about non-descriptive link titles and then I read the article. It's really good and the non-descriptive headline is (presumably) part of it. ;-)

Apparently he didn't want to be great.

I just recently discovered, much to my own surprise, that I am in fact not a good businessman. I've got management experience, and I've done that exceptionally in the past, but it turns out that that's not the same as being a good businessperson. I have good ideas about policies and customer service and so on, but I really stink at paperwork and organization and all that kind of stuff.

I need a partner. :-(

"whether you’re an individual or a manager, your job is to scale at what makes you great"

Great quote from the article, I have always wondered about scaling what I'm good at.

    "You’re uniquely good at them and you not quite sure why."

I don't know of anything like that... I know some stuff I'm pretty decent at, but there's thousands that are better than I am at each of them. So how can I "scale at what makes [me] great"?

Maybe think of it as uniquely good within your sphere of influence. I'm bottom of the bell curve in generic small talk when you dump me in the middle of a sales conference, but in the context of the IT department I work in, I'm usually put forward first to chat with customers.

I tend to think of it as the one-in-one-hundred trait. Given yourself and 99 other random people, what can you do that they probably can't?

That doesn't mean you're the best in your country, or in your field, or in the world, or whatever, it just means that you'll tend to be the best at a lot of small companies, and among the best at the larger ones.

It's sort of a binary question, I think--if you're in a low-density job like "neurosurgeon," it's neurosurgery. If it's a high-density job like "Marine rifleman," it'll probably be something other than your basic job description. For variable density jobs, which could be anything from "rank and file code monkey" to "RMS," it's a true conundrum.

For the record, I'm still not sure of the answer, nor what I want to do when I grow up, although I'm enjoying network security.

Good article, but I still vehemently hate people who turn adjectives into nouns. I can't have a "horrible" therefor I have determined I am perfect at everything.

Try reading it as an adjective with an understood noun, kind of in the spirit of an "understood subject."

I really have this problem, and I think a lot of other people probably do too. Often things seem obvious to me and I assume the same for everyone else. Consequently, people have a hard time understanding what I'm saying.

To fix this, I really try to analytically break down my idea, which bores people to tears.

Anyone solve this satisfactorily, or do you just find yourself a russian lit major?

Try using a lot of cultural metaphors. They can convey a lot of information in a small package, plus they're entertaining to the listener.

Not useful for everything, but for 1 or 2 technical ideas very handy.

Thanks, that's a good suggestion. Any specifics you've found useful?

It's age and audience-specific, but it used to be you could make references to popular TV shows. With the net anymore that's gotten tougher. Movies are still a good staple for metaphors. As are stip-mall Americana-type references.

For instance I had a project manager (I coach agile teams) that had obviously lost track of her project. She kept coming up with new ways of doing the work, and the team didn't respect her and wouldn't attend meetings.

I was trying to explain to my team what the atmosphere felt like. I finally said "She's like a little girl at Wal-Mart, outside on one of those quarter fire truck rides. She keeps spinning the wheel left and right, desperately going to put out the fire, but the wheel's not connected to anything. She's just frantically spinning away while everybody watches her and smiles" or something like that. It got the point across at a deeper level, I think.

When I teach coupling and cohesion I usually talk about people living in houses -- you want your stuff in your house, and you don't want all the structural members of all the houses connected together, etc

Leaky Abstractions? Gilligan's Island. No matter what the professor or Gilligan made with those coconuts, you just knew it wasn't as reliable as the real thing.

Hope that helps. Kind of hard to come up with stuff without context.

Yep, you are your 'Horrible'. Deal.

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