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Taleb makes an argument in Black Swan that a bad model can do more harm than no model at all, and that "we can't throw our hands up" is not a valid excuse either: sometimes that's exactly the right call.

I was nodding along and then had to stop and think. Are Amazon and Netflix actually good organizational examples to emulate?

That shouldn't have happened enough times that Ive developed a Pavlovian reflex to avoid unpacking his bag. Or if all hotels they stayed at were that shitty, perhaps some stern words should have been said to the people responsible for booking travel.

But this sounds like a case of someone being a diva. Hardly the mark of a great leader and role model. I've known people like this by the way. They act like any accommodation is beneath their princely person and berate the servant class members unfortunate enough to be assigned to caring for their majesty. It actually stems from a deep sense of insecurity and the need to overcompensate by appearing larger than life.

Obligatory disclaimer: Jobs still achieved great things and I like my iPhone just fine most days. We can celebrate his accomplishments while acknowledging that he was not a perfect person. None of us are.

> He joked about how he would never unpack his bags upon arriving at a hotel because Steve would call him and say the hotel is shit so they had to move immediately after checking in. I think it’s those human connections he made that made him so great.

This is awful, no? There are people like that who can never be pleased. Usually narcissists. I fail to see where the human connection is in being a crybaby Karen.

Not to diminish Jobs' accomplishments, but it's one thing to say "he was a complicated man, achieved a lot but was difficult to deal with" and quite another to being up that story as a positive. That just seems like Stockholm syndrome.

So which people are going to fix global warming and save the whales? The ones smashing windows, the ones burning tires, or the ones who use profits from lectures on BLM to buy up a ton of real estate?

You know that high you get when your software finally works, with all the little cogs churning away and producing something much bigger than any one of them as a system effect? That, but with people. Feeling powerful feels good.

Or a variation on the theme: "we know this schedule is aggressive, but we have open reqs to hire another 3 engineers"... who of course never materialize.

The below is a joke, but sadly it is representative of most teams I have worked on.

If it's like anything that most managers do, you have the team come up with estimates, have some meetings to see if you missed anything, discover that you did, then create a schedule, remembering to add slack time for unforeseen interruptions due to people getting sick, customer issues, etc.

Then you see that the schedule is too long. Slowly but surely browbeat the team into saying "yes" to the question "do you think this can be done faster" on every task. Do this some more when someone from sales asks if something can be delivered in a particular quarter.

Get very stressed out when the real project deliverable dates align much more closely with the original estimate than the unrealistic one. Micromanage your people and stress them out. Keep freaking out as you miss every deadline in the "pipe dream" plan.

Deliver the project with a mild slip compared to the original plan (because you missed something major in the original planning as it is impossible to foresee everything). Use the twice-too-short plan as your metric though. Still, the product is awesome, so give your people a pat on the back.

Hold a "lessons learned" presentation swearing to never do this again. Speak at length about how critical good estimation is. Go on to repeat the very same exercise for your next project.

Just had an idea: maybe keep the version of the timeline from before you haggle down the dates and keep checking which one matches reality better? You don't have to tell the developers that you are doing it if you believe us programmers need some flogging to keep us coding.

Are you me? ;)

Just kidding, I am not a VP and it sounds like your starting position was worse (so you've accomplished a lot more). But the rest of it reads like something I could have written.

My suggestion: therapy. It will take more than a year because what you'll be doing is slowly undoing some habits and ways of thinking that you have built up over a lifetime. Because they are so established they will take a while to change.

What absolutely not to do: anything that starts with "kicking my own ass". My guess is you already do a lot of it. Is it working? Thought so.

What you want to do is replace shame with picking some core values for yourself and sticking to them. Why not shame? Because when you are kicking your own ass in your mind, you actually split off the motivational part of yourself and make it your enemy. No wonder there is resistance! You are probably a very nice person. There is no reason your inner voice can't be nice and motivating at the same time. Think mentor, not drill sergeant.

Finally, it helps to talk to real people about this instead of reading books. This can be a therapist or a buddy. Why people and not books? Books won't call you on your BS :) In a nice understanding manner of course.

P.S. This is all "do as I say, not as I do". I struggle with this sort of thing also. If you are anything like me, you know all the right stuff to do, fail to follow through, and then beat yourself up about it. I have also wished for an accountability coach from time to time, but they are expensive. I wonder if something similar can be accomplished in a peer to peer fashion. Email in profile if you want to try.

The chat that doesn't require immediate feedback is called "email".

Otherwise you are stuck with "hey, can you help?" with zero details for when you actually get to take a look. Then you have to say "yeah, what's wrong?" and wait another hour. A properly written email would have solved the issue in a tenth of the time.

Of course it's completely unrelated. All lawyers are interested in DNS sniffing, haven't you heard? It's going to be more popular with that crowd than golf soon! /s

You have never been to Russia and yet feel comfortable saying it is "something else in this regard", basing the statement on a YouTube search.

The average stats are about the same, but that's as useful a number as the average temperature of the patients in a hospital.

For the places a visitor is likely to go, Russia will definitely feel safer. Crime there is largely pushed out of the densely populated city cores and into the outskirts. In the US, it's the opposite. A downtown core looks (and smells) like a dystopia unimaginable to most citizens of the world. People are always shocked at how terrible the world cities that heard about so much look in person.

Seems like Gotham is eager to live up to its comic book version. Except in real life you don't get Batman stepping in, you get the mafia. It's easy to see the next step too: these organized protection groups get some members who specialize in being the muscle, and an ambitious leader who'll actually market himself as the protector of the people instead of just a guy with a Facebook page.

Another way to get crime stats to look good is to ignore crimes. Even from the article we are discussing here it sounds like there have been dozens of instances of assault and robbery that were ignored. Ignore enough and people stop wasting their time reporting crimes. Stats look great, the streets tell a different story.

Many shops are optimized to make the kind of thinking and organization described in the article impossible. They keep throwing developers into fire after fire, leaving no time for any reflection and growth. I was surprised to see several representatives of this camp pop up on in the comments here.

If as an engineer these people give you the creeps, remember, you don't have to work for them. If you do currently work for someone like that, you can get out and keep your sanity. The best places to work are not sweatshops.

Most people will never wake up. The system's very existence relies on it. Or alternatively, our system arises from humans being basically apes with very strong in-group/out-group instincts.

I wonder if you'd still be using those big brave all caps if the tables were turned and you were the one being censored. It could happen, you know.

And it's not like the crazy hours are necessary in any way other than to create a cutthroat competition for artificially limited residency spots. Why has the AMA decided to destroy the health of those whose job it is to preserve the health of others?

Agreed! I periodically burn some karma on this point and should probably stop. Most people are brainwashed to believe the system they live under is the bestestest and won't even consider any other alternative. Indeed this unfailing belief is necessary for the whole thing to work.

When you point out to them that political systems fight for their own survival, just like organisms and memes do they call that "whataboutism". But fundamentally we are all humans and we function about the same way the world over.

In times of stress we humans put a ruthless dictator in charge as a last-ditch Hail Mary. Once conditions improve we replace them with something more suitable. Trying to "enlighten" an impoverished place like Afghanistan is misguided and just keeps their society stuck. But most people think dictators are mysterious aliens that arrive out of nowhere and start oppressing the poor masses.

Before you click that downvote button, think for a second. Imagine that America was a place of poverty and desperation. Whom would Americans elect? Oh wait, we already know who middle America made president back in 2016. The way to get people to elect friendlier governments is to make their environment better, not moralize.

All those Uzbeks shot for buying property should rise from the grave and haunt you for being such a troll. Must be millions of them. You should be very afraid. But maybe a Coca Cola mist will keep them at bay? Maybe if you chant Adam Smith's name while you do it?

By the same argument: Facebook is a US company, so Russia is innocent.

Just because someone uses a front to hide behind does not mean they are not behind the activity.

You are probably pushing yourself too hard, become demotivated and quit. Think about it this way: you are never going to beat Usain Bolt no matter how hard you try. So just go for small improvements.

Run half a mile, limp another half, go home. Repeat this 3 times weekly for a month. By the end of the month you'll be running that whole mile. Now keep it up and get to 2!

So in the US there was a big kerfuffle about how Russia paid for some Facebook ads and interfered with the election. Russia bad.

Here you have an app that literally tells people how to vote. This is pro-US, so again, Russia bad.

I think you cherry-picked here. You are thinking about the Baltics and forgetting about places like Uzbekistan (now broke) and Kazakhstan (rich but authoritarian). And even if you say these are former republics rather than satellites, think of the mess that is Serbia.

The fall of the USSR may have been overall a good thing and even inevitable, as with any huge disruption it was not an unequivocal good thing for every single person.

You could also just relax your requirements. You need a great convincer. You need a technical person. There is no strict requirement they have to be the same person though. What you have here is two jobs mashed into one job req.

As a complete outsider, I would think of this as follows. The current status quo is a Comcast/CenturyLink duopoly. Let's imagine I wanted to start a local ISP. What would kill my company the fastest?

The thing that would pop up as #1 for me is access to poles to run fiber. If this killed Google Fiber it can definitely kill a smaller upstart.

There are gatekeepers who limit this access and they work for the county, in the permit office. The incumbents have a relationship with these people, and if they don't you better believe that their folks will start building one as soon as your project is announced. All your local contractors currently supporting Comcast are also not on your side.

It is in these people's best interest to see your project die. To make things worse, they don't have to work very hard to make it happen. All they have to do is sit on a permit application long enough to cast doubt on the project. Whereas the broadband manager has a huge hill to climb in comparison: they would have to build a relationship with all the people blocking their progress or figure out how to sidestep them.

So the person you are looking for should have high-caliber government sales skills. Good luck finding someone like that who also has a masters degree in CS and will work for 140k. This person can make millions in commissions in enterprise IT sales and they know it.

Usually yes, with an AT command: http://www.messagestick.net/modem/Hayes_Ch1-1.html

Knowledge of AT commands is still useful today, but the modems are cellular: https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-com...

So can I continue to prefer my narrative? It seems to gather some upvotes and some downvotes, so at least it is interesting and elicits a reaction :)

Also, the more I learn about my heroes the more I realize that they never saw themselves as ubermensch. If anything, self doubt seems to be the common thread. I think this angle does not get enough attention.

However, I agree with you on a broader point. This is just one perspective. Here is another one: Turing the historical figure is necessarily oversold because many more people than Turing the real person contributed to his aggrandizement. Like all cultural icons, Turing the idea outlived and outshined Turing the man.

Disagree. A finely crafted but ultimately false story can be actively harmful. A young person may think that they are not of the same caliber as "the greats" and cannot make their mark on a field, which would discourage them from trying. All the while in reality "the greats" were never as great as the historians later depicted them. "Come on in, collaborate, and make a difference" would be a much more positive message and wouldn't be any harder to explain than what amounts to the creation of personality cults.

Many things is modern human lives are social constructs. They are very important to the functioning of society, but they are propped up entirely by people believing in them. These are things like national borders, currencies, human rights, rules of etiquette, religions. They only exist in the minds of humans and they are only as strong as the number of people believing in them.

These concepts are so important to the functioning of societies that believers will automatically treat anyone daring to question their beliefs as an enemy and attack them. It doesn't matter if you simply raise doubts and don't attack the idea outright. You are still an enemy weakening the fortifications and need to be defeated.

Here's the kicker: our science is so advanced that most of us are lay people in most areas by definition. Neither you nor I actually have a deep understanding of how an mRNA a vaccine actually works. Sorry if you are a scientist working on this btw, just making a general assumption. Anyway, for most of us, due to lack of deep understanding, it all comes down to belief. Do I side with the crowd chanting Dr. Fauci's name or with the alt-right? Both choices are completely mindless and are based on social dynamics alone.

Therefore, because the belief is based on social dynamics you get the social dynamic type threat response. Anyone believing differently is an enemy.

Things most people understand don't tend to elicit this reaction. For example, few people will argue with the idea that a car is faster than a bike or that water is wet. You believing differently does not attack the foundation of their belief and so you can safely question.

The only thing that will work long term is education. It has to become as clear to people that vaccines work as "water is wet". Unfortunately, that is hard, and the media decided to take the social construct shortcut, with predictable consequences.