Interesting Links for 02-02-2024

[andrewducker]

1. Wherein Book Aziraphale and TV Aziraphale have a chat. (I still wish the TV series had been more like the book, but I know I'm in the minority there)

(tags:TV books neilgaiman writing fanfic comic )

2. What are Edinburgh's bold new plans for congestion?

(tags:edinburgh transport )

3. How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

(tags:success advice )

Comments

[simont]

I selfishly approve of #3, because I'm very much one of the people it mentions who always wants to be working on the complicated and interesting parts of a project. This article is encouraging people to come and help me with all the bits I don't enjoy so much. I wouldn't dream of contradicting it! :-)

[andrewducker]

Seems fair enough to me!

And, frankly, we need plenty of those people. I sometimes *am* those people!

(Recent work project I joined late on, and there were lots of smart people all working away very hard, and it just needed someone to collate it all and go talk to everyone about what was going to happen. So I did that, letting people get on with the coding. Everyone was happy.)

[simont]

One of my weirdest software development experiences was some time ago at work, where I took over the tech-lead role in a project that had already been running for six months. So I was in charge, but knew less about it than anyone else.

My normal style of tech leadership is that it evolves out of having originated the code base, so I know it better than anyone else, and my usual thought process goes "Can one of the other developers manage this piece of work, or is it difficult enough that I'll need to roll up my sleeves and do it myself?" But suddenly that was flipped round: "Is this piece of work simple enough that even I can manage it, or difficult enough that I'll have to delegate it?"

I don't mind doing easy things while I learn my way around, but it gave me severe cognitive dissonance to combine that with also being in the top spot! Even after that project came to a successful conclusion, I'm still not sure exactly what I did that constituted useful leadership. But nobody complained about lack of it, so *shrug*, I suppose?

[andrewducker]

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership - which is an approach I thoroughly endorse!

[simont]

I approve of it too, but I don't think this was it. This was technical leadership, i.e. I was concerned with the code and the functionality, not with the people and their growth and development. My employer separates the two quite strongly, presumably on the theory that worrying about each one is a different skill.

Another odd tech-leadership case was the time I became a de-facto tech lead on a project simply by virtue of being the last person in the pipeline. We had a handful of people each working on changes to a different tool, and all the changes had to work together, and it so happened that I was the one whose changes could only be tested by using the other three tools as well. Which meant I was often the first to spot bugs in the other three people's work, and also had the best overview of how much overall was left to do on the project.

[hairyears]

Well, that's orthogonal to my own approach: learn a skill that other people do not value.

Key point: make sure that this skill is something essential to the organisation (even, or especially, if they don't acknowledge it) and somewhat harder to do well than do badly.

The advantage, here, is that you don't have to be particularly good at it, to be better at it than everyone else around you.

All else after that is a combination of making yourself perceived to be indispensible, and applying your inner geekiness to finding the parts of your skill that are actually interesting do.

[mountainkiss]

“Learn to code with AI” seems an extraordinarily stupid thing to suggest if the tagline is “you are not that smart and have no talent”. If the article’s thesis were to expound the steps of learning to be a hard worker then this could be a good example, but here it’s a top-line heading with no further unpacking beyond “it’s a great thing to be able to do”. I do not think the writer understands their own purpose.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. I read that as an example under the heading of "Learn undefined skills".

[mountainkiss]

Yes but that’s fundamentally incompatible with the premise unless you give a lot more structure to the learning process. People who can learn undefined skills off their own bat are smart and / or talented.

[greenwoodside]

As someone who does walk around thinking 'I'm not smart and don't have any talent' and has been working unpaid overtime for a year to ensure that my above average productivity will protect me from blowback for my insufficient personal charms and flare, I admit the whole premise of article #3 makes me feel a little ill.

God knows, I spend what little social energy I have trying to make sure my colleagues feel valued and appreciated and not just like a fleshbot stop-gap until AI can take over from them.

[anef]

I'm interested in why it makes you feel ill. Is it because it is suggesting that you do a whole lot more work than you are doing already?

[greenwoodside]

On a gut level, I think that embracing an identity as an office drudge/a drone/a talentless hack is unhealthy and damaging to the person that does it. People get a large part of their social status and self-worth from their job. In my case, I spend most of my 'best' energy there -- the morning and afternoon energy to work and get things done and be productive. And doing that while saying to yourself 'well, I don't have any meaningful abilities so I'll do all the boring jobs for the Better People so I can go on existing' can ultimately lead to a situation where you don't want to go on existing all that much.

Objectively, I recognise that people are innately unequal in their abilities. I went out with a physicist with a near eidetic memory. Some people have perfect pitch and beautiful singing voices. Others have bodies that allow them to become top athletes. I learn a language as a hobby, but I know I'll never reach a native speaker's level of proficiency because I long ago aged out of being able to do that.

And even outside of innate talent, of course, there are people who've had extensive training in field x or immersion in specialism y, meaning that they're competent to do certain jobs and others aren't.

I suppose if I were to try and argue against self-labelled dronery in professional terms, rather than emotional ones, I'd say that it stunts professional development and can harm organisational outcomes. Imagine someone doing a low-paid, routine job noticing things in the course of their work that it could be useful to their employer to know. But making pertinent observataions is above their pay grade; they've decided that they're the Z Team, and so don't believe what they think has any value. And the higher status people in the organisation have sensed that they view themselves as a robot stand-in, and have started treating them that way, and don't ask. So the chance of the possible benefit or avoided harm is lost, because the information has fallen down a black hole of absent self-esteem and fixed hierarchies.

[greenwoodside]

Thank you for asking : )

[anef]

Thank you for answering! It seemed to me that all the skills that the writer was pushing are skills that are important in management. True, they were describing them in a way that made them seem dull and boring. You don't have to be a technical genius to be a good manager. Being persistent, getting things done, knowing how to manage people and move projects along are what's necessary.