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Comment by Dayshine | Hacker News Reader

The argument seems to be: don't promote/support good ideas or projects because if they're good they'll likely succeed without you, and then the initiator will be slightly more confident.

Which is phrased as "not my job" for some reason.

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The message is that process is there to extract value from people with average skills and motivation. When you find someone very skilled and self motivated doing the right thing, don't let process hamper their way.

I wish the article actually said that in plain words instead of trying to foist it into that peculiar "wolf" analogy (or whatever it's trying to do). I found the article kind of confusing. Thanks for spelling it out.

I thought the message is “you might really want to find and encourage and promote and support your best programming talent though overt action, but such overt action might in fact have the inverse unintended outcome, often best to ensure you know such people are in the team and ensure traditional management does not get in their way or piss them off with traditional corporate thinking, which has zero idea what great programming talent looks like or is motivated by.”

That’s what I read.

But did OP actually suggest their job is to “ensure traditional management does not get in their way”? I’m almost certain their point was not to interfere even at that level, which is why they didn’t hype it up the chain and let it land on its own.

Part of not hyping it up the chain is also that a lot of these projects are experiments. They may work, they may not, and some pivots may be required along the way. As soon as something is hyped to leadership, now there are feature lists, timelines, and expectations. All room for creativity and experimentation are gone.

I’ve gotten in the habit of not telling anyone about side efforts I’m working on until they’re done, and even then, I usually only tell the people who it might be of use to. I’ve been burned too many times by people trying to “help” or placing a lot of extra expectations and pressure on something. I don’t know if something will work until it works.

Same. New ideas are like starting a fire. Piling too much on top or blowing too hard will stop it. You (together, however distributed across roles) do have to assess if you can handle one more fire, if it comes on top, replaces an old one etc. Getting to this decision in your specific setup is the tough and important part.

10x people can be like one-shot LLMs, your request is for sure wildly underspecified and what you get is 90% determined by the "smoothing term" applied by not you. This is why the right amount and frequency of interation is needed.

I remember when we used interns as an analogy to explain LLMs, now we've come full circle and are using LLMs as an analogy to explain people.

This is how I took it, and what I lived through. Both the supportive boss that let me do my thing without getting in the way, and those who tried to manage everything and make me shut down.

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