Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous | Hacker News Reader

Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous

raganwald.posterous.com

91 pointsbowline_nc41 comments

Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification?

It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its larger audience, but this does not change the original intent.

The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth. Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on removes depth.

Also, comparing Reginald to Mike Daisy non-ironically is very disingenuous. Mike went on national news outlets to pitch his show and highlighted it as fact rather than performance. He was warned that performing on TAL will lead to its scrutiny as a journalistic report and he still went ahead, knowingly misleading the public.

Not in the minority, but here’s the thing. As long as this was primarily in our community, I was comfortable with a wee bit of ambiguity. Hackers and others are perfectly capable of doing a little fact-checking such as looking at my online resume or noticing that I write a lot of stuff like this.

Perhaps one in a hundred or even thousand people reading it might have thought it was real.

But once it escaped our cozy little echo-chamber, it went to a place where many people thought it was real. They aren’t part of a culture that expects parables and satire. They have no familiarity with my existing blow-hardiness on the subject of hiring programmers or privacy. It’s not as reasonable for me to expect that J. Random Facebookfriend will read it and assume it’s a parable.

So, it seemed like the right thing to do to issue a clarification.

tl;dr: An item on the front page of HN doesn’t need a clarification, an item on the front page of Reddit does.

In my experience, it has not been possible to predict the audience of such things ahead of time: in fact, it is the things where the most audience-specific assumptions are made that end up (I believe due to those specific assumptions) ending up in the most surprising and irritating of places.

regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit. and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react when they find out they've been 'lied' to.

i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by now.

Strangely, the amount of anger people feel when their beliefs are revealed to be false is proportional to the leap of faith they had to make to believe them in the first place.

Think of that leap of faith as being personal investment.

Did you read the comments here? Because the HN comment thread was full of people that thought it was a real letter.

There are plenty of good reasons to take shots at reddit. This one is stupid.

I totally agree. Some people understood it, who cares? Their lives were not negatively affected by that in any way. Let them misunderstand. The letter would have been much less compelling with a disclaimer on it.

I thought it didn't need clarification but judging by the comments on HN it certainly did.

We can all bitch about whether or not people should have gotten it, and I don't think very highly of the reading comprehension skills of the people that didn't, but they didn't. The author didn't communicate his point in a way that translated to his audience. That's the entire purpose of his public, rather than private, blog. So it needed clarification.

I had to double-check that the place he was working hadn't degenerated into some sweat-shop with, shudder, an HR department. It was kind of obvious, yet not completely apparent.

My takeaway from this post is that raganwald drastically underestimates the complexity of Enterprise Java FizzBuzz.

I snorted!

It starts with an abstract factory class and ends with a SOAP RPC interface.

I just assumed that Team FizzBuzz was him anonymising the actual team involved.

I did as well. His story seemed a bit far fetched, but not outside the realm of possibility. I did a quick search to see if he did quit his company before I realized what he was really saying. That really hit home with me about how easily it would be for a company to institute this kind of policy and how it might backfire.

Fake activism hurts real activism. Please label your fiction as such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Abdallah_Arraf_al_Omari

I don't intend to minimize your point, rather I want to point out that if you are saying "don't write unless it's real" you are really truly stepping over what value creative writing provides. Even to disclaimer is to say ignore what was written because it isn't real.

Creative writing for satire or parody are critical aspects of humanity. It is unfortunate when lives are at stake as a result. But there are so many writings in human history that do this - what is your proposition for those?

The parent clearly did not say "don't write fiction" but rather "label fiction as such".

All stories are metaphorical, even the true ones. And many of the most honest stories I have read have clearly been fictions.

Perhaps it is attempts at truth telling that should display the clearest warning, as it is generally better to start with the assumption that anything within the realm of normal media is written with an agenda and is probably not entirely true.

As to what counts as fake activism, the claims that were made in the story by raganwald are things that are easily verified as fiction by merely scratching the surface.

Where Mike Daisey actively promoted his work through a journalistic media outlet and only revealed the fabrications after an investigation to trace the interpreter he used in china, this is a post on a blog where as soon as the author is asked, "Is this real?", they write a disclaimer explaining that it isn't, but was written to illustrate a point.

This is why we have stuff like "All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." in a book about starships and aliens in a far-off galaxy. Not everything needs to be labeled for the lowest common denominator.

It wouldn't have been the same, for those of us who thought it was real (I won't lie, I'm one of them.) Whether it was due to not getting that Fizz Buzz is small and wouldn't need a team or that the letter was meant to emphasize the fiction and not hammer home the message (as I thought.) It does no one any good to go and blame the man making the posts for something we failed at (like fact checking, or reading the rest of the comments before commenting myself.)

Yeah it's embarrassing when it happens, take this as a lesson to self improve. Not attempt to call out fake activism.

Edit: Spelled Buzz wrong earlier.

Team Fizz Buzz is not an unreasonable team name! Or is the norm out there for teams to name themselves to whatever they are working on?

Our current teams are named: "Team America 2", "Kill Kenny" and "Etablissemanget" ("The Establishment" in swedish)

Previous company I worked with once ended up with Project Erick, after a CEO brain fart led to a meeting where he kept referring to (present and accounted for) John Erickson as 'Erick Johnson'.

Typically a team would be "named" for its location, general responsibilities, and/or the codename of the project they're working on, particularly if they're large enough to have an actual COO and a "Director of Development".

A project codenamed FizzBuzz is not out of the realm of possibility, but it would strike me as a very unusual choice to name a project after a programmer interview test....

You may have something there, I do recall meeting a member of Apple’s System Seven team, and his business card read:

Omniscient Thaumaturge, Blue Meanies Group

Not bad! On a similar note Etablissemanget adopted "treating objects like women" as their slogan.

Where do you work and how can I apply for a job? :)

I got a laugh from the FizzBuzz team part. Actually from what I know of Corporate IT I think it might actually take a team "several months" to implement. I was once told by corporate IT guys that it would take "Three Months" to move one of our machines into the DMZ, I got another Internet Connection and set it up myself in 30 minutes. As you can guess they were VERY unhappy about that as it made them look like ... well.

Somehow, I would guess that they were trying to "encourage" you to find a way to do what you wanted inside the firewall.

Did that thirty minutes include a the appropriate security audit?

Some context: The connection was for an appliance provided by a trusted vendor that only needed access from specific outside IP addresses and would not need to be exposed to any internal systems, it could be locked down. There was no way around needing external access and we only had two weeks to finish the project (it was requested by the President of the company because it was requested by a large client) however we were still faced with "it will take so much work, that it will be 3 months" In the end we were able to implement what was requested on time and the customer was happy. Roadblocks like these are why startups are able to run circles around large companies, unless there is someone inside to bulldoze through the red tape things just don't get done.

You can't upset the rainforest (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct1-zq8gf_0). That's against the rules.

You know, some time ago I decided it's much more important that a story is interesting, then that it,s true.

And your story was just brilliant.

What's your take on Mike Daisey's Chinese Apple factories controversy?

There is a difference between not telling that a story is not true (raganwald) and explicitly telling that a story is true (Daisey).

Ah, The Agony and Ecstasy of Reganwald.

Amidst accusations that his concept was lifted from Mr. Daisey, can we expect him to say, "I am not a crook?"

Mike named specific companies and denied that he was making up his experiences when asked. I can sleep at night about writing that particular piece of fiction and following it up with disclaimers on Twitter, here on HN, and on my blog.

And here I thought you had gone most impressively meta with your commentary.

Essays are often only marginally more journalistic than muck-raking fiction.

In my mind, it is the kind of project you could pull off.

I feel like there's an American Spring going on. Before 2012, people have been very reluctant to blow whistles on unethical activities in their own companies, for fear of losing their jobs (likely) and damaging their career in the long term (unlikely, but much scarier). That seems to be changing, with the NYT Goldman Sachs article and various revelations coming out in Silicon Valley. People are finally speaking out about ethical violations (such as the gross violation of policy inherent in a Facebook walk-through in a job interview process) that, a few years ago, people would have been terrified to disclose.

People keep silent about all kinds of scummy things that are happening because of fear, but it's the silence that allows bad actors to have as much success as they do.

In light of this, I think a lot of people, who have nothing to do with raganwald and don't know who he is, wanted the resignation letter to be real, not fictional.

>That seems to be changing, with the NYT Goldman Sachs article and various revelations coming out in Silicon Valley.

Which revelations out of Silicon Valley?

Is Mr. Braithwaite a technical lead or a director? Did he resign or is he just at the pub? Now I don't know what to believe.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a quick way to find the answers to these questions.

http://braythwayt.com/

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