6 ms·
I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula"
by jp57 3mo ago
I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments.
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.
Every manager who'd ever directly managed him knew what a treasure he was, but it was often hard for us to convince others of the value of his solutions because they were so simple, and people were convinced that hard problems must have complex solutions. (or else they would have solved them, right?)
He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.
- xg15 3mo agoI 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."
- adrianN 3mo agoIf 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.
- wwind123 3mo agoYeah, 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?
- mym1990 3mo agoGood managers are fairly rare, even though every manager probably thinks they are a good manager.
- phtrivier 3mo agoI'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 ?
- cognitiveinline 3mo agoradical candor is a good book that explores a simple framework for people management.
- transitorykris 3mo agoA 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.
- mym1990 3mo agoI 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.
- causal 3mo agoDepends on leadership culture. In toxic (aka “competitive”) environments managers are insecure and fear their own staff as potential competition.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- abhaynayar 3mo agoIf 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.
- skydhash 3mo ago> 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.
- chii 3mo agoThis 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.
- skydhash 3mo agoSometimes 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.
- eru 3mo agoI 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.
- thelonelyborg 3mo agogreat story.
- doctorpangloss 3mo agookay, 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.
- boothby 3mo agoA 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.
- ForOldHack 3mo agoIts 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.
- Sharlin 3mo agoIt 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.
- nradov 3mo agoHow 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.
- golem14 3mo agoUnless 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!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ranit 3mo ago>> 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?
- analog8374 3mo agoIf a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.
- left-struck 3mo agoI 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.
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- analog8374 3mo agoit'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.
- eru 3mo agoCompare and contrast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
- kleiba2 3mo ago
- random3 3mo agoreminds me of this other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385
- eru 3mo ago> 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.
- kj4211cash 3mo agoThis 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.
- eru 3mo ago> 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.
- armcat 3mo agoI 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.
- sjamaan 3mo ago[dead]
- andai 3mo agoPerfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing to take away. ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry