> you get hired for your proven ability to (…)
No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)
The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.
No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)
The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.
Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent.
We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load.
The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server.
That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO.
Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first.
The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually.
So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years.
So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being.
This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present.
A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well.
Our eyes met.
And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."
1. Shut down or shutting down (e.g. team reduced by > 50% since I've been there)
2. Julius removed, endlessly seeking work, keeps getting fired, and can't find a place to call home
The meteoric rise of the Julius is an exception - sooner or later their lucky streak ends and they face the cliff of adversity, towering above them with no way to climb it - no skills to help him actually do it.
I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.
It is always like this. Your ability to socialize will bring you further than any other skillset. The Kennedys for example manufactured their status by socializing. Industry is no different.
If you think this was about IP addresses, well ...
I present, our contact form.
And generational wealth and serious political power.
> Industry is no different.
Based on these comments, maybe some self-reflection is in order, as it seems from the 80% comment that what you mean is that 80% of people are able to adequately communicate.
To be clear: I've never seen people who follow this strategy contribute anything of value, and it's the biggest red flag on a resume. You learn and grow more by seeing things through.
In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.
Talking to bots on Telegram isn't new.
Running agentic loops isn't new.
Giving AI credentials and having it interface with APIs isn't new.
Triggering AI jobs from external event queues isn't new.
Parking state between AI jobs in temp files isn't new.
Putting all together in one product and marketing it to the right audience? New.
At the end, only time will tell how much there really is to this.
It often does, if killer app means popular app.
And I'm not talking about just any kind of assistant, because those are already existing for decades now with various degrees of competence and all kind of flavours.
I have a feeling OpenClaw et al. will only still exist if somehow all of the gaping security holes are ever able to be closed and through some sort of magic, less than 5% of the users get hacked within the next year, but I'm not sure it's even possible to close those holes, since the entire point and usefulness of such tools is to give them root access and set them completely free.
Hugely underestimated comment. That's pretty much the entire point here. Many people didn't know something with these capabilities was already possible. Or some - like me - knew of the potential, but couldn't be bothered/didn't have the time to put the bits together in a satisfactory flow (I'm currently exploring and building on nanobot[0], which is directly inspired by OpenClaw; didn't touch OC because it's in JS and I'm a Python person). Everything came together really well, which is why it's a "killer app". And now the dam has burst there will be customized takes on the concept all over the place (I'm also aware of a Rust "port", Moltis[1]), taking the idea to next levels.
[0] https://github.com/HKUDS/nanobot [1] https://github.com/moltis-org/moltis
I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.
It may sound preposterous but I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.
I would assume most people with a little work-experience has encountered the kind of legacy systems which is crucial to the business, yet for whatever reason doing any sort of work on them involves a tremendous amount of friction.
A technical person who knows how this system works in and out will often claim that certain seemingly simple things cannot be done, because of how the system works.
It might be highly impractical, but if we're honest about things, it's all software. It can be changed if we decide to and the company is willing to put in the effort to make it happen. It's clearly possible, but the skilled worked will often present it as an impossibility.
The Julius, not hampered by such knowledge or constraints, will be see a seemingly simple problem, and maybe even imagine what other things would be possible or even "simple" if that problem was solved.
If the Julius manages to get management approval for these ideas, you may actually end up getting management approval for changing/upgrading the base system causing the friction, something the more fact-based engineers would not.
Chances are it's going to be messier than projected, not being delivered on time... But in the long term it might be a net good for everyone involved ;)
You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind
But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little.
There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.
I did enjoy your link though.
(gen)AI is not even a person. And you have to pay for it, in some way
No, Julius is not a spectrum. There is a line between being one or not being one. It’s not just a slider between “socially outgoing” and “technically competent”, it describes a particular type of individual.
> Oh and everything doesn't suck.
I think it was pretty clear I didn’t mean literally. Obviously the Sun doesn’t suck, nor does water, nor do an infinity of things which humans could not have as hand it.
in a startup give me unruly pirates over obedient sailors (sj).
IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.
Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius
You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood
Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels
Good luck with that