Everybody is faking it. | Hacker News Reader

Everybody is faking it.

thatgraph.com

52 pointsRaphael42 comments

Bill Gates managed to walk into IBM, tell them that Microsoft had an operating system to sell, retained ownership and received royalties on said software, yet didn’t once give away that he had nothing. That’s right, he didn’t have a single line of code to offer up on the chopping block. This feat lead to one of the greatest wealths in history.

This is totally wrong. This is the part taken from "Pirates of Silicon Valley", that movie was a work of fiction. IBM always knew Gates was buying QDOS from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computers. It is just that IBM couldn't strike a deal with Tim Patterson for QDOS or Gary Kildall for CP/M. Gates comes into picture, assures IBM that he would buy the OS from Seattle Computers, improve it and license it to IBM for a low fees. IBM didn't have any problems with that, as they never saw software as an integral part of a computer (They were all hardware companies).

Thank you.

When people come to absurd conclusions based upon urban myths, it's nice when someone bothers to set the record straight.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone were faking it? If all you needed to excel at anything were some gumption and a ready lie?

Instead, in the real world, the good people have dedication, have put in the hard work, and have been blessed with abilities and the right environment. Education and experience are a part of that. Some people know what they're talking about and others don't, and at times it's very obvious who is who (especially in highly technical fields).

His example applies, as does yours I think I agree about some degrees; computer science is something you will need and use as a founder or Cto but does anyone really need a "business managment" degree when you get that job; you'll get more than enough on job training

Most web startups don't do much with computer science, and a computer science degree generally doesn't prepare you to build a web startup.

It always smacks of an inferiority complex when a group a people who largely thus-far haven't actually been successful in business snipe at people who studied business and suggest that all of their skills are meaningless.

Excellent points.

This is perhaps why so many solopreneurs can't make it: startups need the symbiotic, complementary talents of code people and business people to build products from ideas that have time-relevance -- as in "this is what is needed NOW". Otherwise, a person wanting to build startup is forced to be a fast learner.

Even though I had a business degree, I knew I wanted to work in tech. I had an MBA, but kept teaching (was already in the process of doing so) myself to code; and now, I consider myself both a code person and a business person with a successful (I do consider zentu.net successful) startup.

It was just a lot harder and it took a lot longer to build with one person. Also, even though I was self-taught, I seem to know a lot more and have a bit more, um, demonstrated competence, than some CS people I've met.

I sometimes get the idea that high-level theory in CS is probably a lot like the high-level (economic) theory in business: it's great and fun to talk about and muse upon, but at the end of the day, it doesn't always help you accomplish anything specific.

Keep in mind that a team of hybrid code/business people would destroy a team of pure coders and pure business people any day.

It's fine to specialize, but a startup requires all of those skills collected in as few people as possible so that decisions can be made quickly and there's no miscommunication because less communication is necessary.

We agree.

So why do you think that I am having such a hard finding gainful employment myself as a hybrid business/code person?

BTW, when I said I consider zentu.net to be "successful," I just meant that it works, has decent Alexa rank, I get lots of thank you emails, it produces slightly more income than cost of running, etc (we're talking strict hosting costs here, assuming I've been working for "free" for myself on it). It's not like I actually attempted to get actual VC or anything like that.

Because in a larger team (anywhere that is hiring, as opposed to two people in a garage) comparative advantage starts to kick in.

Even if there are only two of us, and I am slight better at A while you are slightly better at B, the most efficient distribution of labour is that I do A and you do B, despite the fact that we can both do either.

This gets more true the larger the team, because as the team (and the work) grows it is more likely that you have enough work to keep a specialist busy.

A startup needs perhaps 1.5 coders and 0.5 business people, so two hybrids is more efficient than the specialist minimum of 2 coders and a business guy. But a larger business might need 5 coders and 2 business guys, so you are better off with 5 pure coders and 2 pure business guys because they will be more experienced in their specialty (and therefore probably better) than 7 hybrid types.

This is a great explanation of why it's hard to find a job as a hybrid jack of all trades. Founders/owners don't really want hybrids because they're harder to manage, and often have a harder time proving to the world that they're better than the pure hacker or the pure business guy.

So find smaller, earlier-stage startups and you'll find people who are clamoring for what you offer.

I checked it out and don't see how you are generating income with the project. Will probably submit a project though, all the Pagerank helps! :)

It takes a smart person to look for a developer with vision, and a smarter one to keep them on-board. The tough thing is finding a business model that can be used to bootstrap profitably, but that will also scale.

I had a lot of 'business management' lessons when I studied economics. Most of them were so full of emptiness that I came to think that most of a business degree is part of faking it, a kind of symbolic ritual. (There were however a minority of useful things like accounting, controlling, tax laws).

If I remember well, I also read in a book about german economic history that business schools were created mainly to allow business people to boast degrees just like medical doctors and engineers.

I think the efficacy of everyone "faking it" depends on the morality of the lie - that is, are your lies moral or immoral?

If people fake appearances in order to reach a viable result (as with the Microsoft story he tells), that's often moral - a "white lie". Most of us lie in this way many times each day - it eases relationships (business or otherwise).

What would suck is if everyone just told lies to get ahead while breaking the promises made in the lie. Microsoft delivered the operating system they bluffed about to IBM. If you lie and don't deliver, you're just a scammer and your lies are immoral.

That's the difference between lying and bullshitting.

Most consultants lie, claiming that they can do X to get hired to do X. But they do so with the knowledge that once they're hired to do X, they'll be able to learn it very quickly, absorb the business situation, and apply X in an intelligent way.

Saying you can do X when you can't is lying. Saying you can do X when you know you can learn it over a couple of weeks is bullshitting. Both are dubious, but one at least delivers acceptable results.

Saying you can do X when all it takes is a few days to get up to speed is not the same as a direct lie. A lie would be I can do X because I have been doing X for 10 years aka faking credentials. The are several times where I helped someone fix their code where I had no idea what language they where using. I never said I knew the language just "I think I can help" and more often than not I did.

Yes, I think that's pretty much what I said, although I think I phrased it badly.

I meant to say that most consultants bullshit, rather than lie. Thanks for the correction.

In fact, if you were to ask a handful of the most successful people in this world what their secret was they would unanimously say, in one form or another, that they learned to play the system (read: fake it).

Unverified. Why should I believe that random-guy-from-Internet has any credibility or perspective on what the world's most successful people would reveal as their "secret to success"?

To his credit, he is putting his money where his mouth is. Bill Gates didn't have an operating system, and this guy has no peer-reviewed success study.

Would you prefer he said "I've done 10 years of research at Harvard and Oxford, and concluded that everybody is just faking it. Do not listen to important-sounding studies from impressive-sounding universities!"? :-)

Steve Jobs' option backdating move, anyone?

That is one lousy article. It's too short, and doesn't come with enough provisos. I agree with the spirit of what he's saying, but for crying out loud, people are expensive to train, and lots of them turn out useless anyway. I'm sure there are many, many fields where Trojan work and a determination not to give up will get you very far if you get a little luck and grab it for all it's worth, but you have to be up to hammering your head at that wall until it breaks, and in some fields the wall ain't breaking (mostly due to licenture issues)

A friend took three years to get into video games programming after building a substantial portfolio, getting business experience and doing a Masters that's stupidly competitive to get into, after getting his CS/IT degree. If you're that bloody minded, sure you can make it, but don't put down the people who turn you down when you're an unknown quantity. Look at your situation with cold eyes, not fake optimism and opinions of your worth and capability.

Faking: I don't really think so. It took me a while to flesh out the "stories" about my past jobs to the liking of employers, but even though, I don't think I am faking it. Rather, it means to realize that one has indeed done the one or other thing that was interesting, even if at the time it was just a job. And also, in the sense of "faking", to realize that even not so special things are not so bad after all, because all other things are not so special, either.

As for hiring people without degrees, I must admit that I also have a certain sympathy for people who might be thinking to themselves "I toiled through years of university and startup hardships to get to the position where I am now, and now I am supposed to just hand the same thing to this hotshot on a plate?". Maybe it sucks a little, or employers miss out that way, on the other hand, a certain test of determination might be helpful at times, too.

"Rather, it means to realize that one has indeed done the one or other thing that was interesting, even if at the time it was just a job."

This is exactly my experience, too. It's hard to "play up" what I've done, because once I've done it, it seems like anyone could pick it up right away; things I've done are obvious to me, so it's hard to figure out what to say about them. Actually, the same thing applies to commenting and documentation: once you know enough to write comments, it can be hard to figure out what to write to speed understanding when you or someone else next looks at it.

"You ought to go to a boy's school sometimes. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together."

--Holden Caulfield

Only one question to the author, which I left on his blog:

So, going by your argument, would you like to be treated by a doctor who got in via option 2?

Why not? If he has a good, or even exceptional, track-record, are you going to refuse to visit his office because he lacks a degree?

Definitely. A doctor without credentials is not a doctor, he's a witch doctor.

the degree will allow me to find out what sort of training he had prior to practise, what sort of ethical standards he was traditioned under, and guess at his ability to treat something he hasn't seen before based only on "track-record."

For example, if he got his exceptional by cutting people up unnecessarily, and he learns by mistakes instead of learning from a community of certified professionals, it doesn't matter if he's really really good now does it?

I'd say, I would want to be treated by a doctor who is a professional and loves his job. Credentials obviously cannot guarantee both.

sir, you would feel comfortable being treated by a professional road-kill picker-upper who loves his job?

Credentials cannot guarantee that the doctor will love his job and that he has certain degree of professionalism, but it does guarantee that he is at least smart enough to fake through 10 years of med school. Your statement implies that a professional isn't the same thing as credentials, but in the real world where we can't read minds of stranger, most of the time they are the same thing.

That is a very good point. That's why there's got to be something that's going to tell us better than credentials about the person.

Wide brush generalization supported by an anecdote and a hypothetical situation... pass.

No, fail.

So that's what people who are terrible at their jobs tell themselves: that everybody else is a fraud too. I've always wondered how they got through the day...

I thought this blog post sucked until I came across the phrase "If you take a play from P Diddy’s biography..."

Also: I recall reading another book where the author wrote that he offered to work for free, and was turned down. And it was a huge blow to his ego.

Not every company wants to deal with unpaid interns.

to be successful one has to work hard and think. the trick is that anyone can do it.

XYZ always seemed complex and unmakable to me. After making XYZ it seemed like the simplest thing in the world. After a while more and more things were makable.

The courage to get on the 'success' path of working and doing oftens means getting over the "but i'm just a faker" mind-block. If it helps you to think that "everyone is faking it", fine. Just get on with it :-)

He is talking about commercial success. And "lie, cheat and steal" was best strategy for ages...

It seems almost ironic that an author who sees no value in education beyond securing credentials that get you a good position is only offering anecdotes to back his position.

In many fields, there is a growing mismatch (in terms of time, effort, and expense) between securing credentials and securing an education.

Madoff could have written that.

More emphasis on training, and less on education per ce, would be more helpful for economic growth. So, instead of various loans and so on to help people get a four year degree in say, ancient Sumerian languages, offer loans for people to get tech certifications in things like networking and so on, things, in other words, that actually benefit the economy. If the United States wants to compete in technology and engineering, a greater emphasis on tech training and certifications is needed. Higher education still applies as a need in things like chemistry, medicine, and physics, and so on, but in the engineering fields, tech certifications could fill a void.

We have two problems: a lack of prowess in sciences and maths, and a lack of prowess in engineering. More opportunities for tech training by way of trade schools, certification programs and the like, can fill a void in engineering. However quality degree programs are still needed to fill the gap in producing people skilled at the maths and sciences. Basically, the chief scientist of your company still benefits I would say from having a Ph.D, but your average Joe-hacker probably only needs a few training courses in whatever language he is working on. So there is some truth to the "faking it" idea, but not complete truth I think.

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