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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Uh,

I can't see how a person can have "goodness" without that goodness having a structure which could be studied, systematized and taught somehow.

Whether that could be made into the kind of system marketed by gurus is naturally a different question and I'd be skeptical about that.

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> I can't see how a person can have "goodness" without that goodness having a structure which could be studied, systematized and taught somehow.

How do you teach someone an attention to detail, good work ethic, and perseverance?

Those are character traits, not methodologies. If a PM has those 3, he'll be a good PM regardless of anything else. Actually, if someone has those 3, they'll be a good anything.

Agile or something else might make someone better, but they can't determine if someone is good.

How do they have those traits without being taught them? They are 'character' traits, but they are still taught. Surely we can agree you are not born with a good work ethic?

Some traits are inherent to a person. You develop skills over the years but some people "just are" more organised and disciplined.

I find as I get older I get more organized and disciplined. Maybe its because memory isn't as good at absorbing information as effortlessly as it used to be.

I've got more organised as I get older, not because I want to make the world a better place or anything altruistic. Over time I've learned that if you are organised it takes less effort.

You can teach them. I personally had a lot less attention to detail before studying math. Good work ethic and perseverance can be taught as part of reaching a bigger goal, for example in sports.

I have to be careful to adjust the level of detail down. And, frankly, that's one thing Agile is good for - the use of narrative.

I feel like shop work ( saws, sanding, filing, etc ) and music are better for that but maybe that's bias. Sports teaches some things, but there's an awful lot of sorting going on and some of the "adults" have weird reasons for being there. But I think of character as "what you do when nobody is looking."

Truly great coaches are worth it, though. The best one I ever had told me to get out of sports :)

Yeah I agree, but I suppose the person has to be willing to learn too. I can point to a couple of specific teachers and lecturers during my school years, and then the technical director at one job, who all influenced me a lot and shaped my work ethic and desire for attention to detail. Colleagues and friends may not have felt as influenced by the same people.

It takes two people. I guess I'm implicitly assuming that the student will be relatively bright and wiling to learn but will be lacking some of those soft skills at first.

I can't see how a person can have "goodness" without that goodness having a structure which could be studied

If Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance isn't required reading anymore, this could be a sign that it should be.

Can you teach someone to be good at what they do? Of course you can study people who are good at what they do. Perhaps other people who want to become good at what they do can learn from that. However, no one will become good at what they do purely by emulating someone else, since what they do won't be the same thing.

Besides. Things like Agile aren't "observing what people who are good at what they do, do". It's a formalized process based on the ideas that some people who are good at what they do have about WHY they are good at what they do. But do people who are good at what they do really know why they are so? They probably don't! Besides, they are going to mix in all kinds of things that they think they do, or they think they should do, or they think that good people they learned from did, in that formalized process. In the end, the process they describe may sound good to them, but have very little to do with what good people actually do or should do in any particular circumstance.

That is a ridiculous statement. But that 'definition' there are no good or bad people, good or bad engineers, good or bad project managers, scrum masters, managers or anything.

Not everyone can be 'taught' or just go by a structure. In fact I would strongly argue that those who just go by a predefinied step-by-step structure are always never the 'good' ones.

Can you teach it in less than 20 years? How do you know if you've taught it correctly?

The question isn't whether it is possible to teach it, but whether it is practical.

I'd guess that the structure would have to be really big to cover all kinds of situations and corner cases.

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