Comment by BoxFour | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoxFour | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to be contrary and cynical say that something funny is going on here.

Going from desktop to mobile development, for example, isn’t a monumental task necessarily but if you’re spinning up on an entirely new framework, language, and even way of thinking (old devices, low connectivity, etc) I’m extremely skeptical that you could learn it to any appreciable degree in a week of real time, let alone work time.

Sure, it’s possible there are factors making this transition easier, and yes some of those mobile concerns apply to desktop as well, but to me this reeks of a few possible situations, none of which are good:

1) Bob is doing things without really understanding what he’s doing, perhaps literally following a guide to the letter without a shred of critical thought about what he’s doing.

2) Bob is working far beyond what he’s billing

3) You’ve over-hired by a fair amount and your technology is so simple that people can solve your business needs even in disparate contexts extremely easily. If your Android app is just a web view connecting to your site, for example, sure i can see that being simple enough to fix in a week.

There are people in this world who are very smart. Those people can be much smarter then you.

Often smarter people tend to congregate and less smart people do as well. So many people live in bubbles where they think they're the smartest person in the room; but the reality is there are plenty of rooms out there where they'd be the stupidest person.

I don't know who you are but the fact that you can't comprehend the existence of someone who has superior productivity is an indicator that I think you haven't been humbled. You live in a bubble. Try switching rooms sometimes to see what's out there.

Just the opposite actually: I used to work in academia and I’ve met some incredibly intelligent people who were leaps and bounds more insightful than 99.9999999% of people I’ve ever met (including more so than myself, obviously).

The common trait for all of them was a desire for deep understanding and diligence in acquiring that in all aspects of their lives, not productivity or even the appearance of it.

An emphasis on, or even appearance of, productivity is something I find in dilettantes more frequently than anyone else (probably not shockingly). The Instagram CEO types, frequently.

Are you sure you've known several folks who each have a one-in-a-billion talent level?

No, but I can use contextual clues like other accolades to extrapolate from my own experience with that person here (like being a Nobel laureate, for example).

To your point though, more like one in 100 million I suppose if I’m to be more accurate.

I would doubt that even most Nobel laureates would qualify as 1 in 100 million. There are nearly 1000 living Nobel laureates out of 7.7 billion, so the rarest they could possibly be is about 1 in 8 million.

Additionally, Nobel Prizes only cover a handful of fields out of hundreds of possible fields people could work in. I would put it at more like 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million.

So you're surrounded by Nobel laureates and that is a factor in your judgement? Did these laureates gain the prize through productivity and intelligence? Does it prove you're not in a bubble and that your experience is broad enough to validate your suspicion?

From my view point it really depends on if the Nobel laureate won the prize for IQ or productivity; or whether the category has any relation to the two aforementioned categories. If I remember correctly only very specific Nobel categories meet the aforementioned criteria.

A factor in my judgement about whether the people I’ve met who dwarfed me with their intelligence were actually intelligent? Yeah I’d say it’s a factor :).

Is this some kind of nihilistic moral relativism thing you’re playing at here? Otherwise I’m unclear what your point is.

You implied I’ve never been exposed to extremely smart people and couldn’t fathom someone like Bob existing, I think I’ve made it pretty clear that’s a silly argument you made from a bad assumption.

>Is this some kind of nihilistic moral relativism thing you’re playing at here? Otherwise I’m unclear what your point is.

I thought my point is obvious. I'm saying your descriptions are unconvincing.

The obvious path forward is to describe your "bubble" in further detail. What was the nobel prize for?

> A factor in my judgement about whether the people I’ve met who dwarfed me with their intelligence were actually intelligent? Yeah I’d say it’s a factor :).

I think this sentence shows you're unable to sense the implications of my statement. Why would I care about your judgement at all? Nobody cares, especially if we think you live in a <small> bubble. Does this clarify the next step? I'm basically asking for a more detailed description of your "bubble" so that I and others reading can make their own judgements about your bubble and the validity of your claim.

So far your arguments of "academia" and "nobel prize" are unconvincing to me. Is that not obvious? I thought it was, I guess I need to be more explicit next time.

> Why would I care about your judgment at all?

Why do you expect a stranger on the internet to prove the relative intelligence of everyone around them, to you

>Why do you expect a stranger on the internet to prove the relative intelligence of everyone around them, to you

Why do you expect a stranger on the internet to answer your question?

I'll answer your question regardless: I'm not expecting shit. My question was more of statement about why I disagree with him and why his opinion is invalid to me. I don't think he had an answer. I only ask for a "proof" out of politeness.

It was a rhetorical question, I thought that was obvious. Thanks for the useless answer.

You thought wrong. Please work on your communication skills next time you open your mouth or write something here on HN. Don't want to be pissing someone off or violating the rules. Thanks.

Perhaps your bubble simply doesn’t contain enough people with sufficient communication skills to help you pick up on rhetorical questions.

Also, someone who isn’t expecting an answer doesn’t pedantically repeat their condescending question across the thread.

I don't expect an answer. But it wasn't a rhetorical question. It's along the lines of "If you disagree with me or have evidence proving otherwise please offer it. I don't think you have such evidence but I am open to hearing it."

This is very unlike Your post which is full of malice. Yeah let's talk about our academic circles. I offer mine freely: UCLA. Not that great of a school honestly. It also depends on which department your in.

Now yours: UC Santa Barbara. You never offered it, yet I know it. So how smart is your academic bubble? I feel if it was bigger you'd be smarter about how you approach strangers on the internet. If you approach with malice, they can return your query with equal malice... or greater. Sometimes far greater.

nice try? never went to UCSB.

edit: looks like you found @whynaut on github? I don’t repeat usernames, though.

> unlike your post which is full of malice

Hah! You need some serious introspection.

bro I didn't go to github, or use your username to get your info. Well if you're not from UCSB, then someone else is getting a nice surprise in the next couple of weeks.

Yes, you did. It’s far too specific and confident an accusation to be anything else.

The only connection you could possibly draw to UCSB from anything in my life or profile is this username/that @whynaut person, because I’ve never stepped foot there or even considered it. Not sure what lying gets you here.

No there's other ways. But Probably still got the wrong person. Too late though and I honestly don't care enough. You're an ass hole either way.

Depends how finely you define the talent.

I may well be the best rubyist that can program while captaining a tall ship. Thats a 1 in 7 billion talent

Weird math tangent: the higher dimension a cube is the greater the fraction of the volume is a corner, until at some point the overwhelming majority is in the corners.

The more talents you consider the greater the fraction of the population is world class for some unique intersection of them, e.g., ruby programming, while captaining, a tall ship

This makes me wish I had studied more math

You're going off-track. Neither GP nor OP are talking about a person emphasizing their own productivity. OP is only "look at Bob being productive, how do we handle it" and GP criticizes your first reason to be critical of Bob. Not sure why you're inserting the whole "appearing to be productive" assumption here.

The response to me was that I must be in a bubble where I can’t imagine someone being significantly smarter and more productive than myself or my cohort.

My response was that I’ve met plenty of people far smarter than myself, but productivity wasn’t their defining character trait or even a particularly noticeable one.

Someone who’s “ultra productive”, like Bob here, is reason to be suspect for all of the reasons I listed in my original post.

There are times in my career I was like Bob, lightening fast productivity, even relative to very smart people around me.

Much of my career, not as dramatic.

My view is the right person given the right work and low enough barriers can 10x their “normal” productivity level. Right work here means not just a technical, but a moral, aesthetic, curiosity, etc fit.

Bob seems to be intermittently getting those conditions.

ADDED: Management might want to strategically consider business opportunities for using Bob’s fast turnarounds. Higher rates for fast deliverables for instance.

>people I've ever met

that's a bias.

Sure, everyone in existence has a bias of some variety. I don’t think that needs stating.

> everyone in existence

That's a bias.

(RIP everyone not still in existence)

Academia is a series of bubbles. It very much depends on which school you went to.

The selection process in schools stratifies intelligence levels between institutions moreso then the corporate world.

It also depends on country. For example in china the education system relies heavily on quantitative results similar to an IQ test. In the US there's more leeway for bias, opinion and affirmative action. Thus, if you're in academia in china the people who surround you are much much more stratified then academia in the US.

Where you went to school illustrates your bubble. Were you in the top bubble or mid bubble or bottom bubble. Saying you're in academia further emphasizes my point.

Well that’s silly, by that logic no one is ever qualified to ever be skeptical about anything because every single person in existence lives in a bubble of their own variety.

I mean you’re in your own bubble making this judgement right now - is it inconceivable to you that someone has truly met some extremely intelligent people and what I’m saying follows about Bob here?

Maybe time to get out of your own bubble ;).

It's only silly if you're unable to comprehend what's implied and need everything spelled out to you explicitly.

Everyone is in a bubble. This is obvious. Nobody needs to be told this. The entire earth is in itself a literal bubble. Again, Nobody needs to be told this.

Obviously what's going on here when I use the word "bubble" is I'm saying your "bubble" is small and low such that you don't think someone with superior productivity can exist. The description of Bob doesn't mesh with you, while for others who live in bigger bubbles think there's nothing abnormal here. So Obviously I'm talking about the Size of the bubble... and I'm saying your bubble is small.

You said it's not because you're in academia, and I said academia is the ultimate <small> bubble and I gave my reason why.

I didn't think it would need spelling out, but obviously the way forward is to further describe your "bubble" what makes you think it isn't "small" or "low". I mean this is pretty obvious. For example... which academic institution, which major, and what other experiences you have outside of academia?

>Maybe time to get out of your own bubble ;).

Of course this is Possible. But, obviously I'm not in agreement with you, and our disagreement is the purpose of this discussion.

Your counter was "academia." So I emphasized how that doesn't tell me anything. Again, what do you think the obvious next step is?

>An emphasis on, or even appearance of, productivity

Is Bob's emphasis on productivity directly or is that a result of a different emphasis.

From the article:

>This creates a situation where Bob is becoming somewhat anxious, as he feels guilty for not having enough tasks and is getting increasingly worried that our manager might be holding tasks from him in so he can fired without much hassle at some point in the near future.

One interpretation is that Bob isn't anxious about the lack of productivity nor about others not being productive. His anxiousness is from not doing a good enough job and risking his job. Bob is likely some combination of having been taught to please people, that he must be maximally productive to keep his job, and being in a position where loss of a job would hurt enough to cause anxiety (developers being one of the few roles that are able to earn themselves into not needing a job, but Bob isn't there yet).

This isn't relate to Bob's intelligence, but to his upbringing, what he was taught to value, and his current moral situation (and a lack of teaching him to pace himself to avoid burnout). In this specific case Bob is doing well enough to be causing a problem for others, but it is common to meet many Bob-like people don't get through the entire backlog as quickly or otherwise have an effectively infinite backlog. Those cases often seem destined for some burnout related negative outcome.

>incredibly intelligent people who were leaps and bounds more insightful than 99.9999999% of people I’ve ever met ... The common trait for all of them was a desire for deep understanding and diligence in acquiring that in all aspects of their lives, not productivity or even the appearance of it.

100% This.

This doesn't mesh with the intelligent people I've met. Not all of them are on a quest for deep understanding of everything. It's more that they happen to have deep understanding because of high intelligence, not because of a strong desire to understand.

Intelligence has almost nothing to do with productivity. For example, who's more productive:

Engineer #1, spends 30 hours in a week flawlessly moving an important backend service to a completely new framework, adding complete test coverage, impeccably clean code, clear, readable documentation, and who even gets accolades from their peers for their work.

Engineer #2, spends 2-3 hours reading the code and the code of the dependent services, talks to a few non-development teams about how they use the service, and determines that the backend service never needed to exist, and with a small business process change that will save $1MM a year, convinces a director to nix the entire project.

Engineer #2 was more productive. But to an outside observer, and especially so to highly intelligent, highly productive engineer, #2 will get a massive amount of hate. Since the productive worker archetype almost always focuses on how the work is valuable to them but has a limited sense of direction on how it is valuable to others.

Right. I know a few really incredible engineers. Maybe not this fast but its certainly possible for people like this to exist. It's funny that people think, "No one can be that good!".

To (3)'s point, the manager doesn't realize what's possible and the current devs are actually working 4 hours a week. Bob is exception, and _actually_ working 40 hours a week and getting 10x done.

The question wasn't posted by the manager though, but by someone on the team.

I don't think that was explicitly stated

The poster was the tech lead, per one of their comments.

A tech lead and a people manager can be the same person

It was explicitly stated in the comments ...

> He expressed that to me. I'm the tech/team lead, but not the manager. I told him our manager isn't going to fire him and that his productivity is stellar, but he kept himself skeptical. Being fair, I understand his fear of being fired - he was fired from a similar position because of how looks/dresses on his free time. Our company couldn't care less for those things, as even our CEO is fairly alternative herself, but those traumas never really go away.

It is stated by the assertion that the poster doesn’t think the manager is stemming tasks pre-fire. This implies they are different people.

Agreed.

That is also what stuck me when i read the OP; it is just too good to be true.

I have only seen people this productive only in the niches that they worked-on/had-expertise-in and never any "Generalists". It is funny to me how people here are swallowing it all wholesale without any critical thought.

4) Bob is outsourcing his work.

Joking, but it is a possibility.

Yes, I thought about putting this down but thought it was a bit uncharitable.

It is a thing that’s happened obviously though.

Someone savvy enough to outsource their work wouldn't be worried about losing their job for having an empty queue, they would spread it out over the week. Adding more tasks increases the likelihood of getting caught

I agree. To me, this sounds like the “smart guy” who if left unchecked will leave a trail of destruction.

If the business model is a simple framework where incremental tasks are assigned, consistency and risk management is more important than happy developers. If Bob is a true rock star, he’ll move on, which makes sense. In the meantime, the business has redundancy and isn’t impacted.

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