[HN Gopher] Revolutionaries at the Workplace
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Revolutionaries at the Workplace
Author : spuriousfox
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-12-14 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (damnoptimist.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (damnoptimist.substack.com)
| gumby wrote:
| > What's most infectious is how deeply they care. Their goal is
| to get to the right answer, not to look good.
|
| This is the difference between the revolutionary colleague and
| the jerk.
|
| Some people are self-described "truth tellers" (I.e. jerks). Or
| the annoying ones whose motivation is to look "good".
|
| The ones who are genuine are hard to get upset with.
|
| I've pretty much only worked at "cause" companies. I would think
| someone like this might be annoying at a company "revolutionizing
| the corporate purchasing space"
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I've adopted one or another approach in different projects and
| teams, it depends. Sometimes the team lacks someone to "push" the
| project in the bold, but ultimately right direction, and the only
| thing stopping is inertia/fear/politics. Other times it's not
| clear what the "right" direction is and you need to discover
| together.
|
| I guess it takes some calibration to know when it's the time to
| be the jerk, but there are times it's definitely necessary.
| [deleted]
| DnDGrognard wrote:
| Sounds like a very simplified version of the the Belbin team
| roles two vs nine.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| A much better framing of this dichotomy:
| https://randsinrepose.com/archives/stables-and-volatiles/
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It's certainly "better" (and I do like it), but it needs an
| editor. Takes too long to say its thing.
| jancsika wrote:
| Quick digression--
|
| Was Baudrillard's point essentially that capitalism is always the
| "main" function (hee hee) in the outer scope with everything else
| becoming subroutines/subprocesses/etc. of it? E.g.,
| "Revolutionary" here is merely a local variable to a function
| do_capitalism_more_efficiently, rather than itself being a global
| variable in its own right.
|
| I mean, I get that Baudrillard was essentially focusing on
| certain edge cases: e.g., where function challenge_capitalism was
| in fact running in a VM that was spun up by function
| do_capitalism_more_efficiently. But with that caveat, is there
| anything important I'm missing from his writing with my analogies
| to scope here?
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| I like this framing. My previous framing came from `Loonshots`,
| where Bahcall frames this as "Artists" (Revolutionaries) and
| "Soldiers" (Evolutionary). I felt that, in the context of
| engineering, Artist/Soldier felt dismissive against the soldier.
| Revolutionary/Evolutionary avoids that for the better.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863447-loonshots
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| One mitigating thing I remember from that book is that no
| person is inherently classified as an "artist" or a "soldier"
| it's more that people can be operating in that mode depending
| on their current role, or even dividing time between one mode
| or the other depending on the circumstances.
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| Agreed. I don't think switching the framework from
| Artist/Soldier to Revolutionary/Evolutionary detracts from
| the malleability.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Mixed feelings; maybe just feeling a bit defensive as I fear I've
| been playing the role of revolutionary in my current work and
| don't care for some of the negative descriptions which
| unnervingly ring pretty true.
|
| Mid article though, it says
|
| > That's because organizations tend to become more bureaucratic,
| political and consensus-driven as they grow.
|
| Is this somehow ever a good thing? Largely, all of those things
| just seem bad. Luxuries of inefficiency a product can enjoy only
| once it works itself into dominant/monopoly position where it's
| bankrolling becomes secure.
|
| The groups I've moved away from over the years (often with other
| revolutionaries moving on as well), became more evolutionary. And
| all of them have basically devolved into product lines on life
| support, the "evolutionary" employees left behind don't
| understand why management won't invest in them and would rather
| buy up competitive offerings to remain relevant.
| notpachet wrote:
| > organizations tend to become more bureaucratic, political and
| consensus-driven as they grow
|
| Hot take: a big part of the utility of these "mature" companies
| in society is to serve as a kind of glorified daycare for
| adults. The people they employ can feel like they're
| contributing something to society, and legitimately earning the
| money they're bringing home, even if a bird's eye view would
| reveal that they're just treading water and not really
| producing any net benefit. This allows the employees to feel
| better about themselves than they would if the government just
| handed them a UBI paycheck and sent them back to playing
| videogames all day.
|
| I've seen a lot of turmoil between people who are legitimately
| trying to make the world a better place through their work
| (spoiler: it wasn't always me), and coworkers that prefer to
| just operate in daycare mode.
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| If you're interested in more discussions along this road, then
| Bahcall's `Loonshots` is a good read. Lots of anecdotes, little
| science, great stories. Overall I found it fascinating. I found
| myself nodding along to most of the goodread's reviews, if you
| find yourself on the fence.
|
| On-topic, I think its a natural evolution for organizations to
| stagnate and calcify unless there is a fundamental recreation.
| Lots of things could be cherry-picked here for anecdata (Roman
| Republic, Roman Empire, General Electric, <insert fortune 100
| company here>)
|
| I don't think that's bad. You wouldn't want an innovative
| person being your line cook at a restaurant -- you want the
| innovative person to be the _chef_. We also don 't want the
| laws governing the countries we live in to violently change.
| Systemic, evolutionary, progress is good.
|
| The challenge is figuring out a balance and what to do to
| prevent the organization from calcifying (becoming product
| lines on life support), prevent it from throwing away what
| makes the organization good (chasing the next big thing), and
| continue to let the organization innovate and thrive (stay
| relevant) without being eaten.
| nineplay wrote:
| > Consider the ratio of R to E on the team when hiring
|
| Even accepting his premise of Rs vs Es, this seems absurdly
| short-sighed. Engineers come and go, engineers can change their
| R/E approach over time or based on project. If you feel like you
| can't manage a team full of Rs - and decide to hire a less
| talented E for balance - then the problem is the way you manage.
| Take ownership of your employees and find ways to use their
| talents, don't throw your hands up and hire for some personality
| type that you imagine you've sussed out over a set of one hour
| interviews.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| It's an interesting framing overall, but I'm not really convinced
| that the R/E distinction is as clear in real life.
|
| The key attribute that both R and E types here seem to share is
| _caring_ and a commitment to a larger team goal/outcome.
|
| The care/don't care distinction seems clearer to me and much more
| recognizable. Within _cares_ people, there may be a further
| divide in styles, between progressive idealist and
| tactical/strategic (corresponding to R and E). But the thing
| about caring, is if you care, you'll notice if your approach
| isn't working or you need to change your style to suit the
| environment.
|
| The implication of this framing is that leaders really need to
| make sure there is a clear vision/goal/outcome/mission for the
| _cares_ people to organize around. They also may need to
| recognize that most people unfortunately don't care about their
| work or their contribution to society beyond raising their
| children and consuming, and that's fine/not likely to change.
|
| For people who care, then, the task is to recruit/organize the
| people in the organization to help avoid counterproductive work,
| and nudge things in the right direction.
|
| (And of course, like nearly all categorizations of complex human
| systems into binary, my categorization is just a concept to
| organize thought, not an assertion of truth; people are fluid and
| drift between and sit on a spectrum between those categories)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I like this article, but there's another way of classifying that
| I also like: letter grades (remember those from school?) which
| uses hiring psychology a little more. In a successful startup,
| whom you hire makes or breaks you.
|
| 'A' players hire 'A' players.
|
| 'B' players hire 'C' players.
|
| Independent of Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary, we have pure
| intelligence, education, and animal cunning. An 'A' player has
| all those, and moreover _knows_ when a Revolutionary strategy is
| required, and when it 's not.
|
| A 'B' player tends to be Evolutionary, because it's safer, but
| occasionally he'll say "me, too!" to a Revolutionary if it seems
| to advance his career.
|
| An 'A' player can recognize another one. That's all he or she
| wants to hire.
|
| A 'B' player is bewildered and threatened by an 'A" player, and
| moreover, the 'A' player wants nothing to do with _him_. So he
| wants to hire someone who 's safe and no threat to his tenuous
| position: the 'C' player.
|
| After the startup is successful, the 'B' managers flood it with
| their resumes. They like a safe bet. Once they get in and start
| hiring their own, it's all over.
| wrnr wrote:
| You like putting people in boxes and therefor others must, just
| like you, put people in boxes. It must be hard to be autistic.
| adolph wrote:
| How'd the the "'B' player" get a job in the first place? Does
| an "'A' player" have a half life at which they degrade to "'B'
| player?" Is the letterness of any basket of skills and traits
| context dependent so that an "'A' player" used car salesperson
| is a "'C' player" philosopher but the "'A player" philosopher
| recognize that person as a fellow "'A' player" but can't
| understand their lack of wisdom-love?
| groby_b wrote:
| That is, pardon the directness, bad pop psychology.
|
| If A players could recognize another one, our industry's hiring
| wouldn't be so incredibly broken.
|
| The idea that there are clear layers of engineering skill is...
| just plain wrong, and that's obvious to anyone who's worked on
| more than a few teams. It's a spectrum, and more, it's
| multidimensional. So is the idea that somehow people not in the
| top layer automatically hire worse people. I've worked with top
| skilled people (think "starting an entire new segment") who
| couldn't hire their way out of a wet paper bag. I've work with
| solid performers who weren't outstanding in any way, except
| they consistently hired excellent people.
|
| I've also worked with people who were mediocre performers by
| themselves, but who significantly accelerated any team they
| were on. Not by visible output, but by being clearly necessary
| "glue" that bound the team closer together and helped people to
| shine.
|
| I've seen superstars go to mediocre, and vice versa, just based
| on managers and or team they were on.
|
| If you can't think about people in more subtle ways than
| "A,B,C" or "Revolutionaries vs Evolutionaries", you are
| significantly shortchanging yourself and your team.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't think you really understand the power of simple
| metrics. Making an assumption (perhaps invalid) based on your
| submissions and comments, you seem to be in a line of work
| whose sales pitch is "Things are complex. You need to hire us
| to explain it all to you." Or maybe you've worked on games;
| it's hard to tell.
|
| Since you've alluded to your experiences: I've picked a
| startup based only on their business description, where I
| didn't know a single person, and it IPO'ed in about 18
| months. Then the 'B' players flooded in, and some other
| unrelated stuff happened. What have you done?
| bsedlm wrote:
| I think he's saying you cannot only rely on any particular
| simple metric (nor just a couple of them).
|
| I'd say you gotta use many metrics, the simpler they are
| the more metrics you'd need. simple metrics ignore the
| subtelties which can make or break.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. No one's advocating making all
| decisions on a single factor.
|
| I think when outside "experts" come in and talk to you,
| they have one Summary slide at the end that gives their
| own "simple metrics" and that's what everyone remembers
| anyway.
| jolux wrote:
| > I've picked a startup based only on their business
| description, where I didn't know a single person, and it
| IPO'ed in about 18 months.
|
| Anybody can do that once. If you could do it a hundred
| times in a row, or develop a science of picking startups, I
| might be more inclined to believe you.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| If anybody could do that once, they'd all have done it
| already, and most of them wouldn't be posting on HN
| anymore.
| jolux wrote:
| You seem to think that you profited by sheer force of
| will and that no luck was involved. Evidence suggests
| there is an enormous amount of luck involved, in that the
| best startup investors still fail to profit most of the
| time. Without knowing more about your methodology, your
| claims here are akin to suggesting that one should only
| hire people who win the lottery, because clearly they're
| good at picking numbers.
| feteru wrote:
| Anybody can do it once, not everybody can do it once.
| It's just luck of the draw, most won't be able to, but
| they could.
| [deleted]
| drekk wrote:
| I like how you wrapped condescension and a humble brag in
| the same breath.
|
| You invested in a company and profited by it. That's all
| that tells us. B can follow A, it doesn't follow that A
| caused B.
|
| I see this in finance all the time. Traders perform so
| inconsistently at long timeframes, no better than chance,
| but think their training--domain knowledge--gives them
| systems knowledge. Systems are more than the sum of their
| parts or the individual actions of agents.
|
| Boxing people into USDA grades like flesh is only ever
| constraining and I don't think the abstraction here
| collapses any uncertainty in exchange.
| unbanned wrote:
| Very good Albert, yet here you are posting on HN like
| everybody else.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Fair, but he did go on and on about all the things he's
| seen.
| groby_b wrote:
| Really? We're playing the credentials game?
|
| Sure.
|
| I've worked on DIS. I've worked on industrial automation.
| I've worked on AAA games. Yes, I've been on (successful)
| startups as well. Yes, I've consulted, too. I've worked on
| the European space program. I'm currently responsible for a
| good-sized engineering org.
|
| I'm in this business for something like 30+ years now. And
| based on all those experiences, I'm fairly certain that
| your simplistic approach will bite you, your team, your
| project at some point. I'm also fairly certain that you'll
| protest that strenuously until it happens. So, godspeed,
| and may the experience not be too painful.
| delusional wrote:
| Ahh, so you consider yourself an "A" player. Ever wonder
| why your personal philosophy places you at the top and
| everyone else below?
| exBarrelSpoiler wrote:
| Trying to read the entrails into another poster's
| personality in response to a not very inflammatory comment
| is just plain gross. A pity, I was interested in reading
| _Inventing the Future_ , but this sort of classless rude
| behavior has changed my mind.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Yeah, I bet you were in the very process of buying it.
| Maybe you can still cancel your order.
|
| Let's review: the original article was a bit of pop
| psychology, like almost all "management science." I
| replied with some of my own. None of this is a double-
| blind, peer-reviewed study, and even if it were, it
| probably wouldn't be replicable, as others have pointed
| out.
|
| groby_b then replied with some high-sounding
| condescension, puffing himself up: "our industry's hiring
| wouldn't be so incredibly broken" via all the incredible
| things he's seen. Except he didn't use any overt insults
| -- just passive aggressiveness.
|
| Things went downhill from there.
| willob33 wrote:
| Are you suggesting founders are A players?
|
| They're the B players who suck up to wealth holders.
|
| Are there A players? Everyone gets a handout at some point. The
| ultra rich get one in the form of no taxes. An A player would
| surely just be a billionaire.
|
| Sure is easy being an A player when your handouts from decades
| ago earned a lot of interest.
|
| How are we still this oblivious? We spent the last decade
| making building these things this easy on purpose.
|
| Where is the A game in using the machine how it was intended?
| drekk wrote:
| What value do you find in inventing a caste system for
| engineers? Psychology already suffers from a replication crisis
| and pseudoscientific quackery; corporate psychology is even
| less broadly applicable to humans.
|
| People are not static; they're not just their genes, and
| they're not just a grade. You said you're an A player, why
| don't we compare your hiring to a random selection of hiring
| managers with similar experience in your field?
|
| My degree was in Integrative Neuroscience and I'd caution
| people against these "just so!" explanations. A good narrative
| is often more convincing than the correct one.
| ziggus wrote:
| This is the same kind of organizational naivete displayed by
| armchair middle-manager wannabes that think stack ranking is a
| great idea too.
|
| Once you start trying to codify potential or current employees
| into buckets delineated by simplistic and frankly silly metrics
| and not by the value they produce in a given set of domains and
| contexts, then you've already lost the game.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You'll note, HN'ers, that I never said that I was an A player,
| nor that engineers can all be divided up into castes. You all
| seem to be extrapolating based on your own prejudices.
|
| It's just a (sometimes) useful way of thinking about top
| executives, who mostly _can_ be assigned grades. Engineers are
| too complex to be divided that way.
|
| As for me: yes, some A players did decide I could be useful. I
| think I was, as an engineer, and they thought so too. On hiring
| people: the record was more mixed; some good and some not so
| great.
| Hokusai wrote:
| This is just pseudoscience. No studies, no test, just a guy
| opinion.
|
| Stop clarifying people this way. It's not useful, it's not
| insightfully. I have seen coworkers fighting for one thing but
| not another. One fights against bad work ethics, another for good
| tech and another one for their own right too be with his family.
| People is complex, everything comes in gradients and that changes
| as people grows and they learn and their lives change.
|
| If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and
| learn from there.
| dominotw wrote:
| > is just pseudoscience. No studies, no test
|
| > look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
|
| Isn't psychology famously pseudoscience as well, given almost
| all of their studies are irreproducible.
| Kranar wrote:
| You can't just call something you disagree with pseudoscience.
| Pseudoscience is when an argument is presented in a way that
| directly suggests it's a scientific finding, or suggests that
| it follows the scientific method, but does so only
| superficially.
|
| No part of this article is intended to mislead you into
| thinking it's scientific or technical in nature. It is one
| person's opinion and they are sharing it and there's nothing
| wrong with that. You can disagree, agree, share your own
| insights, but calling it pseudoscience is uncalled for.
|
| >If you are interested look for some real course in psychology
| and learn from there.
|
| There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with
| respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of
| consensus on this and most other subjects, as well as an
| inability to reproduce a substantial portion of research. Take
| two different psychology courses related to what the author is
| discussing and you'll come away with two very different
| understandings.
|
| Finally I would like to distinguish psychology from psychiatry,
| as the two are often lumped together, unfairly so.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > call something you disagree with pseudoscience
|
| You are right, this is just bullshit. It does not pretend to
| be a scientific study, I over interpreted what it was saying.
|
| > There is very little that one can learn from psychology
| (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal
| of consensus on this and most other subjects
|
| That is a reason to beware of some random opinion,
| assertiveness does not need to correlate with reason. That
| this text is assertive does not make it valuable. I see no
| more learning that people will categorize others in search of
| a simplicity that is not there. As I said, it's not
| insightful in any way, it just simplifies to make people feel
| smart and think that they understand some truth that is no
| there.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| What is even an "Evolutionary"?
|
| Author seems to be just written some intelligent sounding thing
| seemingly inspired by *Capital in the 21st Century*
| trabant00 wrote:
| One can't wipe his own ass these days without it being
| scientifically proven to exist by a study. The same studies
| that can't get no replication. And even if they do, aren't
| actionable at all. Decision paralysis as religion.
|
| "Things are complicated" gets thrown against every opinion that
| people don't like. Not saying anything is wisdom. God forbid
| anybody has any opinion and may God strike him down if he ever
| supports anything but tabula rasa.
|
| Things got done before studies existed, you know. People built
| models from intuition and tested them in practice. Or observed
| patterns. But that's the old wrong ways, right? We publish
| something on a piece of paper now and unless a committee
| publishes it and calls it a study it can't be true. And if they
| do it's true and will remain this way forever, right?
| pkdpic wrote:
| Seems like a good article but I was kind of hoping it was going
| to be about hippie anarchist hackers in the workplace. They're
| always my favorite coworkers.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| This is too simplified such that it is incorrect.
|
| If we look at any personality type system, the
| revolutionary/reformers are going to be a quadrant of discrete
| personalities (and even those can be broken down or treated as a
| gradient).
|
| As an easy example, I'm one of the types in that quadrant. While
| I tend to be independent and self confident, I'm not "an
| inspiring leader". I also have a strong preference for consensus
| (or at least peaceful agreement), and prefer not being the center
| of attention.
|
| Please give this piece about as much attention as you would
| todays horoscope and instead read a few good papers on pubmed.
| smoe wrote:
| I'm not sure how useful of a description for revolutionaries this
| is. They are not necessarily lonely wolfs as I interpret the
| article, they might deeply care or not about things like
| diversity and they are certainly able to do a lot of politicking.
| Unless you want to completely redefine the term.
|
| For me the difference comes more down to, as with the conflicts
| within lots of political groups in history: reformists vs non-
| reformists. The former advocating the reform of an existing
| system or institution whereas the others believe the right
| approach is abolition and replacement. You could also add
| reactionaries, those that want to go back how things used to be.
|
| Neither of which is universally true I think, more often than not
| it is a mix. But I don't think you get very far trying to mix the
| extremes from either side.
| mohanmcgeek wrote:
| > Their goal is to get to the right answer, not to look good
|
| I've noticed that there's a group that wouldn't have a question
| but would phrase their monologue to seem like a question.
| alim459 wrote:
| An interesting read that has a lot of face value for me, but I
| wonder if the "R" and "E" typings are stable through life, and
| how amenable are they are to change?
|
| The article comes across like "R" and "E" are set characteristics
| --almost like a personality trait. I'd really like to
| longitudinal see data on R/E mobility, and how fluidity between
| R/E types might be related to team cohesion overall.
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