duncanriach

Any knowledge or skillset can be misunderstood and/or misapplied. I'm doing my best to express my understanding, which may, of course, be completely wrong. I've also been doing my best to understand this stuff, which included taking a long break from engineering work to study it.

Wow. Thank you. In hindsight, I think I did do an impressive amount of high-quality work. After getting a lot more experience, I realized that what I did was impressive, even though at the time, and for a while afterward, I felt that I was underperforming (even when I was repeatedly assessed as a top performer). This is a recurring pattern for me. For example, I often don't realize the true value of my articles until I read them much later, with a perspective as if I myself did not write them.

I have written a lot about the topics that you're covering, actually tons on it. I have written about motivation, success, and imposter syndrome, and I will continue to do so.

Yeah, some people seem to think I'm arrogant or bragging or "narcissistic," without apparently understanding what that really means. I have spent 16 years in therapy learning to give less of a shit about that stuff, to not take responsibility for other people's emotional reactions. I'm also trying to be as honest and truthful as possible in my articles. I do also enjoy being visible, and I like inspiring others to achieve their full potential.

And I agree: the skills that lead to amazing quality and volume of work are things like focus, conscientiousness, persistence, and self-awareness. I have written extensively about this. All of these attributes are learnable. I believe that anyone can achieve at very high levels compared with the current bar. I'm not special at all.

It seems to me that the smarter someone attempts to appear the less smart they truly are. True intelligence appears as clarity.

Great idea. I'm also wondering if this was actually an article about narcissism very poorly disguised as an article about deadlines.

I always think I'm doing a shit job and not getting anywhere near enough done. However, I always seem to get rated as a top contributor (which surprises me). In this example, my manager told me that he had obtained information that a team of sixteen people had accomplished the same work as I had in twice the time. I believed him, even though it seemed insane, particularly given that I felt like I was doing a crap job. I don't see why he would lie to me about that.

Another example like this (from later) was when I designed a context-switchable HD MPEG-2 core with two other people. We had the CEO/CTO of a start-up come in to pitch their supposedly equivalent core to us. They had a company of dozens of people who had all been working on the project for a couple of years. We had been working on our project for six months and we were much further ahead in development than them.

It seems to me that the performance and quality bar is just really low in general. Execution is way lower than it could be. I can only imagine that it's a motivation problem.

... plus nearly everything else I know about leadership.

In case you missed it, the number one thing I know about leadership is: root-out and fire narcissists. It's the most effective thing you can do to turbocharge your company.

FYI, one of the ways you can spot a narcissist is by how they project their emotions onto others, rather than taking responsibility for them.

Correction: there was one small bug that was hard to avoid but relatively easy to fix. And in terms of interaction with my manager: I did send him a weekly report on what I had done each week. But he trusted me too much, or was way too busy, to interfere.

It's just a date. Ship something by this date. I would suggest shipping more than once before this date. I would not call that a deadline in the normal sense that it's used. Of course, dates should be used as part of the planning process, when necessary. The problem is that most deadlines are overly restrictive and used unnecessarily only to reduce the anxiety of the manager at the expense of the team's motivation. So the net result is less, delivered later.

You can ship a car with an engine that goes 0-60 in 10 seconds. Then you can ship the next car with an engine that does it in 7. If you try to develop an exact thing by an exact date, you're bound to either ship something that's broken on the date, after a lot of heart-ache, or to ship something that works late, after a lot of heart-ache. Then, good luck getting your people to make the next product better. All the cards were played; all the bridges were burned; and you got a shitty product.

Instead: let's ship the best working car we can by <date>! And here's why that date. Who has ideas for how to get an even shittier completely working first-iteration done six months before that? Now, go figure it out and make it happen. I trust you. (To self: and I'll trust you even more as I see each shippable iteration that you enjoyed making.)

I'm not only trained as a clinical psychologist. I also have 14+ of experience as a professional engineer and a manager/leader, with an MS in electrical engineering. So I'm viewing this as someone who worked an individual contributor, a technical leader, and as a manager, and then went and trained as a clinical psychologist, and then came back to engineering. I also coach leaders.

Yeah, I think that there is a deep cultural bias against actually digging in and looking at human problems, like work, from a human-centric perspective. There's a presupposition that most people hold that management is about control. This is why we draw org-charts top-down. In my view, management is about support. I prefer to draw org-charts bottom-up. The CEO is at the bottom. The whole structure is there to support the effort of those at the tips of the branches, the individual contributors.

I agree. But sometimes dates for delivery of something do need to be set. That approach should be very selectively used, with an understanding that it's not a demand that X is done by Y, but that something will be shipped on Y. Then, the question is how do we most effectively motivate people to make X as amazing as possible? On one project where I defined what X was (a unit on a chip), I delivered it by Y with all the most important features and zero bugs. Later, my manager (who I almost never interacted with) revealed that my productivity was equivalent to 32 engineers in a competing company.

Narcissistic employees are one of the main causes of loss of employee motivation. Deadlines are a highly ineffective mechanism that attempts, unsuccessfully, to motivate employees (by controlling them with fear).

I am the author of the article.

To those commenters who write that deadlines are necessary because many, or most, employees are not motivated self-starters, I posit that this is a symptom of poor leadership, originally by their parents.

Yes, it's possible to force people who don't want to do things by using fear and control, but it's much more effective to use what we know about human nature to generate a 10x output that is sustainable and actually enjoyable.

Ineffective leadership is not an optimal solution for ineffective leadership. It's a downward spiral.

This reminds me of the people who spank their kids because they're disrespectful, but, as we know from research, spanking kids makes them disrespectful. Spanking kids just makes them pretend to be respectful while being increasingly disrespectful.

I don't agree. You pay someone a few hundred K and you can get x or 10x or 100x out of them if you know how people work. It's much better to get 10x or 100x out of all of your employees if you want to maximize profit.

Sounds like an opportunity to me. The East Bay sounds like a great place to start a paradigm-shifting company that attracts all the local talent.

I can also skip all traffic jams on my motorcycle. When I see a traffic jam, I get excited.

Getting rides with Lyft or Uber give me even more control over my own movement than driving a car. I get a built-in chauffeur and valet (no time or money spent parking), plus I don't need to pay for maintenance costs or spend time refuelling. Why would waste time and money driving?

Or work from home, or start your own business, or travel at different times, or move closer to work and save money, or rent a room near work, or change jobs, or ...

The biggest factor is limiting beliefs. People try to optimize their circumstances within the constraints of limiting beliefs that they're not even aware that they hold. Everyone is selecting the best choice on the menu, and most people present themselves with a shitty menu.

I think that people in general, at all times, tend to follow the crowd. They tend to buy what everyone else is buying and sell what everyone else is selling. They tend to do what everyone else is doing, even though, usually, it doesn't serve them.

and ... one can waste time and money for a few hours every day in it driving to and from work, so that one can then complain about having a shitty life.

I'm also amazed that this article is doing so well. I didn't think it was anywhere near one of my best. If upvotes are being gamed, and I'm not gaming them (which I'm not), then I wonder who is doing it, and for what reason.

I'm also wondering if people are seeing, or appreciating, something about this article that I'm not.

I think that there is a lot of collective insanity going on that also affects the actions of individuals. The actions of individuals are driven by emotions and by beliefs that are held in place by emotions. Decisions are pre- and post-rationalized. Most behavior, whether individual or collective is non-optimal and usually does not maximize utility in any sense.

That's a great point. I think that most people and organizations are identified with victimhood and poor performance.

Thanks for your feedback. I'll try harder next time. ;-b

Awesome response. Thank you. I agree with everything you wrote.