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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point.

What a novice usually does not realize is:

It is easy to be right. What is hard is being actually helpful, coming up with a viable solution (vs. an idea).

In the posted article there simply was no such solution. It was not viable. Unacceptable.

Yes, an outsider with fresh eyes might see things differently and without bias, but most certainly the experienced team knows damn right that you're right (to some degree), but also knows that it's just not that easy.

Throwing "We are doing this all wrong" around is often just short of saying: "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!".

I'm not saying that fresh input can't be helpful, outsiders might bring in new tricks and ways, but being humble is way more helpful than being loud.

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> It is easy to be right.

It's easier to be wrong.

In the article, the management team had already failed to do their jobs.

They had already failed to notice (or ignored) obvious problems, and the company clearly had a culture that discouraged raising or acknowledging such issues.

They also had failed to work with the client to establish a complete set of requirements - 9 months before the end of a multi-year project.

> It was not viable. Unacceptable.

The option that they suggested, letting the project slip, was a significantly more viable option than what they actually took.

Re-evaluating the requirements and coming up with a viable subset of deliverables would also have been a sane choice.

But since the company had no intention of letting the client know they were having trouble, sane solutions were banned from the table.

> It's easier to be wrong.

And it is cinsiderably harder to be actually helpful.

While everything you said is true, we and the author do not know what was previously discussed with the client. We don't know what was promised by either party, we don't know what the client messed up

Heck, I attended meetings with partners/clients that were simply impossible to get an output from, since the expectations in general were on completely different sides of the book.

But you air this out, realize that everyone agrees, most people resignate, and really helpful is this one guy, that offers to invest effort and time to work closely with a well chosen peer from the other side to get them on your side and finally work on the interesting things.

This is helpful. And it is hard.

Sure, but you're acting like acknowledging a problem is less helpful than pretending that there isn't one.

That isn't the case, has never been the case and will never be the case.

No, I'm not and I never said anything like that.

  > "I just came here and I immediately saw that you all are idiots, you should listen to me!".

i may be a total outlier, but personally, i kinda like this type of person... regardless if they are wrong or right, it shows they have passion and really care (though i will admit this may be a naive point of view!)

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