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> I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.

I did some of that a few times in my life. But I also realised that a large part of the value I brought was not necessarily in coming up with the solution, but in convincing the rest of the company---and in training up enough of the rest of the team to understand and maintain the system.

For example at Goldman, I used an integer linear programming solver to re-shuffle how we assigned compute capacity in different data centres to various departments and how to compute fail-over plans ahead of time.

The actual modelling and implementing barely took any time at all; I used an off-the-shelf open source solver. But I spend multiple weeks teaching the team enough about linear programming so that they can eg change the model when business requirements change.

This is basically my professional career. I've stayed 5+ years at the same place now and it's gotten to the point where people ask for me to build an optimization before it's even clear they have a problem amenable to optimization. Yay! My work has a good rep. But also I'm called upon entirely too frequently to explain work I did years ago or to answer questions like which constraint "comes first". Honestly it's getting very tiring. I think a switch to a new company would help but I wonder what will happen to the optimization work at my current company after I leave. It's weird that such a useful academic field still feels like black magic to much of corporate America. I guess it's just sophisticated enough.

> I guess it's just sophisticated enough.

Maybe, though just applying a commercial or open-source off-the-shelf solver is a lot easier than most of what they ask you to figure out in your average programming interview. Probably about as hard as doing some SQL queries, which we even entrust semi-technical people with.

Of course, when your first naive modelling attempt doesn't work (eg can't be solved in any reasonable amount of time), there's a bag of more complicated tricks and some real ingenious engineering you can do; but again, the lower rungs of that aren't all that dissimilar from what your local database guru does when she tells you to add more indices.

I imagine this is where the reputation of a good manager comes in and the ability to say to their boss "hey, we should keep this guy... just trust me on this."

If the company runs on reputation it’s only a matter of time until a consultant comes in and processes are established to move to a more efficient metric based management style.

Yeah, it's tough either way. Some managers might be biased and keep praising some of their reports that don't actually provide good value for the company. For an outside observer that has no intimate knowledge to the work, how could this be differentiated from the manager having a backbone to support a report that does truly great work but there is no good metric to prove it?

Good managers are fairly rare, even though every manager probably thinks they are a good manager.

I'm one of the few who absolutely believe they're not one of the rare "good" - hopefully, "not yet".

What resources do you recommend to improve ?

radical candor is a good book that explores a simple framework for people management.

A massively abused book that led many to justify being assholes. You don’t have to read it, here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

Care personally, challenge directly.

I think thats a good start probably haha. I am not a manager, and have not had a "good" one in a very long time, so I have no resources unfortunately. That isn't to say mine are bad, they let me be autonomous as an IC and I have a lot of flexibility. I am coming more from a human angle, and not a "these are the 5 things you need to do to be a good manager" angle. In my company, most people are too busy with day to day activities to really focus on developing people. When I parted with my last one, he thought we had only been together for 2 years...it had been 5. I think a lot of managers just don't really listen, they nod their head and give some advice and then 4 weeks later we're just having the same conversation again.

Everyone's situation is different, so without context this probably just reads as pouting or possibly me being incompetent haha.

Depends on leadership culture. In toxic (aka “competitive”) environments managers are insecure and fear their own staff as potential competition.

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.

Getting bored is totally understandable though given his calibre but that's a separate issue from how the company evaluates performance.

> even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.

I’m not a fan of doing politicking, bjut after much courses on writing and communication, I strongly believe that such simple solutions could have been presented in a way to justify rewards.

There are people that do nothing worthwhile and can find words to justify themselves. If someone brings value, you can find words to earn him recognition.

This is what i hate about modern corporate culture (or human culture in general perhaps).

I dont want to expend effort politiking. I dont want to expend effort blowing my own trumpet. The value of my work is self-evident, but requires an equally intelligent person to understand.

And most people do not understand, and thus, fail to recognize the value.

Sometimes they do understand, but often your nice work may highlights someone's else egregious errors. And the political landscape may not work in your favor. So private praise (if you're lucky) and public silence.

I don't think this has anything to do with _modern_ corporate culture. There was never a golden age where corporate culture was better across the board.

Oh, I've worked in more than a dozen of software companies. When it comes to planning activities and setting goals, I've rarely seen a lot of sense.

I mean, we are in the industry where it used to be a standard practice, not so long ago, to deliver daily reports about one's activities while "planking", or throwing a beach ball to another person doing some silly acrobatics...

It should come as no surprise that there's no rigorous assessment protocol for these kinds of things anywhere. Retrospectively, I will admit, that enormous amount of effort and resources are wasted due to bad planning. But it's still not done.

I can imagine that with the field becoming more competitive, eventually, the industry specialists will come together and try to address the problem, but so far and for so long the resources just kept flowing in, the huge waste wasn't really a problem.

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter

Here is why: I turned off a feature flag in our feature flagging service which saved company 10% infra cost, do you think I can be promoted to Staff+ and lead 50 engineers?

Promotions and/or recognitions in corporate environments works differently.

I don't agree with it, but this is how it works: If what you did feels simple, anyone else can do it as well, why should we promote you for finding such silly mistake or improvement.

Same with executives and upper management.

One cannot be a director/VP of 3 people. They need an empire…

One can be a VP of 0 people.

Look into what the title means at banks!

I was an Executive Director / Vice President at Goldman with 0 reports.

Banks are the inversion where a Director is higher than a VP! An ED w/o reports is actually moderately impressive though!

Well, I was on the tech side which (at least at Goldman) has comparatively higher powered titles at less reports compared to the real bankers.

I suspect it's because the tech side doesn't run the model where ambitious young people without a clear idea of what to do go work for an investment bank for three years as sort-of 'finishing school'. So there are less juniors to herd for the techies.

> staff+

Maybe. It looking easy isn't the point. If you have the knowledge and skills such that doing so is a semi-repeatable endeavor, especially in a world where your colleagues apparently missed that 10% savings lying on the floor, is that not (part of) the point of a promotion? [0]

> lead 50 engineers

That's a totally separate ballgame. Nothing in your example says anything about leadership ability. Maybe you have those skills, and maybe you don't, but technical acumen is separate from leadership.

[0] https://mosaicstrategy.us/2016/10/10/know-where-to-tap/

Models of extra compensation works elsewhere, like commissions and base salaries. I would think we could come up with something for engineers and ops in return for saving the company money that doesn't result in exploitative behavior.

There is just no collective bargaining power to put it into effect.

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized/specific products in a competitive environment. That's not to say that efficiency isn't desirable or beneficial in general, but as soon as it becomes difficult to put a value tag on the work being done (which unfortunately gets harder in more services oriented corporations), competing for clever ideas just rewards less than competing for the boss's attention. There's no justice or fairness in that.

Companies can be efficient and inefficient at the same time. Efficient at some things, and inefficient at other things.

For things with direct bottom line impact and fierce competition, many companies can suddenly become very efficient. But in a big company, that's often the exception rather than the rule.

>> He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.

Wow, got bored and joined a seminary - Do you know how does he feel there? A genuine question - Did he expect to get excited and challenged in a seminary?

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less. Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people. Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart makes no sense in a world where smart people usually can’t agree on what is right.

it's a pretty good guess that when a smart person does something like this, it's something he considered long and hard and applied his full smartness to, and therefore it is probably the smart move. Right? Let's not split hairs.

Compare and contrast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

I don't get it, is the point you're trying to make that Ted Kaczynski wasn't smart?!

Just the opposite: he was very smart; but most people don't consider his overall life choices to be something you would want to copy.

Ah, got it! Thanks for the clarification.

Sorry, I was perhaps being too indirect.

well, they are known for being places to discuss theology all day. Theology isnt that far from philosophy, it's certainly interesting enough to talk about

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you."

A good quote. I didn’t mean the question as “atheist vs believer argument”, but rather as an environment where ideas are accepted and flourish. Because I understood the parent comment: “He eventually got bored.” as "He got bored by the corporate environment not getting his ideas and thus went to a better organization in that regard."

So now, how was he, the one with brilliant and unorthodox ideas, got accepted in an institution like seminary? How he felt having arguments there, etc. …

It tells a lot about the state of software "engineering" if it's difficult to convince people of the value of the very best ones (the "lazy and smart officers" in the old story). No good engineer can ever be in love with complexity, that's like an automatic disqualification.

I have the opposite experience with this, and I personally also default to simplest solutions at least as a baseline. However it’s important to distinguish between simple solutions that approximate the problem very well, to simple solutions that work in limited context or with heavy sacrifice in assumptions because those will hurt you in the long run.

How is that sad? A disruptive competitor will come along and eat their lunch. Creative destruction is the natural order of things. Ideally the badly managed organization will eventually be liquidated, thus freeing up resources for more productive activities.

Unless they are, in addition to bad at management, really good at regulatory capture.

E.g. Experian, Transunion and their ilk are unlikely to be eaten as lunch soon.

Apologies to the good engineers and managers in those orgs!

reminds me of this other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385

great story.

okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

Its all a math problem, and if it isn't a math problem, its a database problem. I come across a lot of problems, and since I always try to reduce it to a math problem... I intuitively come up with both the solution to the problem, but solutions to other problems. But, if it's not a math problem, of course, its a database problem.

I would safely assume that there are no limitations of what mathematicians can do, with one important exception: Andrew, for whom I argued about the mis-uses of Infinity. Andrew is, well, rather famous.

Database problems are math problems too.

The hard part is often finding a way to turn your business problem into a math problem in the first place.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away. ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry