[HN Gopher] Profound Beliefs
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Profound Beliefs
Author : sblank
Score : 55 points
Date : 2023-09-09 00:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (steveblank.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com)
| neotrope wrote:
| Love this article. 1. Developing beliefs and
| acting on them is a key part of leadership. 2. Without it,
| you limit career advancement. 3. It's a skill that can be
| learned.
| lisper wrote:
| I can give you a counterexample anecdote from my own career: I
| have spent my entire career writing code mainly in Common Lisp. I
| have a long list of successfully executed projects, some of which
| were done in the face of directly competing efforts written in
| other languages which failed spectacularly. I have a "profound
| belief" in Lisp, and I can justify that belief with a litany of
| empirical data and theoretical explanations. Nonetheless, every
| single time I have ever expressed that belief it has led to my
| career advancement being cut off and ultimately to the loss of my
| position and having to start over.
|
| So no, it's not enough to have "profound beliefs". You have to
| have the right kind of profound beliefs (unless you are extremely
| lucky -- see below). They have to not conflict too much with the
| profound beliefs of your management and co-workers because if
| they do you're sunk no matter how much data you have to back them
| up. That just turns out to be how the world works. I learned this
| lesson the hard way, and far too late in life for it to do me
| much good, but I thought I'd pass it along.
|
| There is one exception to this rule, and that is if you just
| happen to get have iconoclastic beliefs that are also correct
| _and_ you somehow manage to acquire the resources to act on those
| beliefs _and_ the results you produce happen to find a large
| market. Steve Jobs is the poster child for this, and even he is a
| cautionary tale because his career very nearly ended when he was
| first fired from Apple. It was only the good fortune of Apple
| management being utterly incompetent that gave him a second
| chance, which he seized on to spectacularly good effect. But Jobs
| was literally one in a billion.
| wmf wrote:
| Steve Blank's lessons are mostly for founders and executives.
| Of course employees don't get to just choose different beliefs
| than management! Management sets the direction and you either
| agree, disagree and commit, or disagree and quit.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, but I'd extend that to really anyone who is responsible
| for making decisions about something.
|
| If it's your job to chose the development tools, you should
| have some profound beliefs about that. If it's your job to
| use the chosen tools to implement things, you really don't
| need to have any profound beliefs about the tools, and though
| it is helpful to understand the beliefs/motivations of those
| who are making the decisions, having your own (especially if
| contrary) is a recipe for "how to be frustrated at work."
| neotrope wrote:
| It applies to anyone in a leadership position.
| Staff/principle engineers fit that role.
|
| Though you're right, the parent comment suggests they're not
| in leadership.
| psyklic wrote:
| I think Steve is approaching this from much more of a business
| angle. Looking at the Business Model Template slide in the
| article, programming language choice may not affect the
| business model much, except perhaps in rare cases where the
| language/tech achieves a business moat. Founders can definitely
| hold random theories about the business market/strategy, as
| long as they are willing to invalidate them (profound beliefs
| that are loosely held).
| lisper wrote:
| Lisp has a profound effect on the business model because it
| can give you a dramatic productivity boost (like an order of
| magnitude or more) but it makes staffing more difficult
| because there aren't many experienced Lisp programmers
| because very few organizations use it, which makes for a
| vicious cycle. But this is precisely the sort of situation
| that if enough people simply changed their minds that by
| itself could change the underlying reality.
|
| It's not just Lisp. There's a similar thing happening today
| with Rust, which is clearly superior to C from a technical
| point of view, but which very few people use simply because
| there are very few people using it. But Rust might be one of
| the rare exceptions where the technical superiority is enough
| to allow it to break this cycle.
| shrubble wrote:
| The difference I would point out, is that Rust has
| corporate sponsorship. I don't recall any large
| corporations sponsoring e.g CMUCL/SBCL to the same level.
| lisper wrote:
| There are plenty of counterexamples here, with languages
| that had corporate sponsorship but did not succeed (e.g.
| Go) and vice versa (Perl, Python).
|
| In the case of Lisp, it was done in by two things: AI
| winter, and the fact that the Lisp community was never
| able to organize itself. This is the famous "Lisp curse":
| it is precisely the fact that Lisp is a productivity
| multiplier that seals its fate because it allows
| individuals to get things done without collaborating.
| kirse wrote:
| _This is the famous "Lisp curse"_
|
| _It was done in / seals its fate_
|
| https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html
|
| I always thought this essay was a great take on
| Lisp(ers), but it's interesting how those sort of
| statements eventually can self-perpetuate a couple
| negative events into a state of learned helplessness.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Lisp ... can give you a dramatic productivity boost
|
| ... if you are smart enough. If it were that easy to get
| more productivity, everyone would be using Lisp. But you
| need to hire very smart developers to get that
| prodictivity, and most developers are by definition
| average. Your average developer will be frustrated, not
| more productive, with Lisp.
| mlyle wrote:
| An order of magnitude "or more" is an extraordinary claim.
| The evidence just isn't there.
|
| > but which very few people use simply because there are
| very few people using it.
|
| Ecosystems matter: they're one of the ways you get
| productivity.
| lisper wrote:
| > An order of magnitude "or more" is an extraordinary
| claim. The evidence just isn't there.
|
| Let me clear: I am claiming that these kinds of
| productivity gains are _possible_ , not that using Lisp
| will automatically give you a 10x improvement under all
| circumstances. And yes, I can give you concrete examples
| of demonstrable >10x productivity improvements which
| resulted in products succeeding where they otherwise
| would undoubtedly have failed. These are generally found
| in niche applications where there is a lot of domain
| knowledge that needs to be brought to bear. So you're not
| going to see big wins in, say, commodity consumer
| products, which is the reason that the wins don't get
| much press. But the evidence is definitely there if you
| look in the right places.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| If it gives such a productivity boost, why aren't LISP
| shops outcompeting other languages?
| fidotron wrote:
| Historically I think there's a very strong case that
| Symbolics did outperform others with their software
| productivity, especially in graphics. They had an ability
| to wade into certain domains and produce legitimately
| shockingly competitive products, which really should not
| have been possible.
|
| But I also think Lisp leads to spectacular burnout as I
| think it imposes a greater cognitive requirement on the
| part of the developer.
|
| A Symbolics graphics reel from 1989
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4HXPJtym2Q
|
| This stuff was still in use on Final Fantasy 7
| https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-computers-used-to-
| do-3d-a...
| lisper wrote:
| That's a good question without an easy answer, but there
| are two leading theories. One is that languages are
| infrastructure and it's really hard to replace
| infrastructure once it gets established (look at how much
| time it's taking for electric cars to replace gas-powered
| ones). The other is that Lisp's productivity boost allows
| individuals to get things done by themselves and so it
| tends to attract people who aren't good at collaborating
| (the famous "Lisp curse"). So on an individual level it's
| a win, but at an organizational level it might not be
| unless you manage it very carefully.
| leetrout wrote:
| > So on an individual level it's a win, but at an
| organizational level it might not be unless you manage it
| very carefully.
|
| This is why I choose Go many times over other languages.
| Its a bit easy to keep on the rails since it is so
| restrictive (at the cost of repetitive, explicit
| verbosity).
| pkkm wrote:
| > I can give you concrete examples of demonstrable >10x
| productivity improvements which resulted in products
| succeeding where they otherwise would undoubtedly have
| failed.
|
| Well, I would definitely be interested in these examples.
| I occasionally write Lisp (admittedly, Emacs Lisp rather
| than Common Lisp) and while I appreciate having macros
| and other metaprogramming tools at my fingertips, I've
| never encountered a situation in which their use was
| critically important. I can always replicated the thing I
| wanted to do in Python with a bit of boilerplate; if I
| had to choose, I would certainly take Python's huge
| ecosystem over Lisp's metaprogramming. Frankly, I don't
| think there have been any language silver bullets after
| structured programming and garbage collection. So I'm
| very skeptical of the claims of extreme Lisp
| productivity. I'm open to being convinced otherwise
| though.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| I think a couple factors are at play here. First, most
| developers never really learn metaprogramming or use it,
| even in languages with native facilities for it. You
| don't need it to get the job done, strictly speaking, and
| it is a difficult skill to acquire. Second, many software
| applications don't benefit that much from metaprogramming
| even when you have those skills. The benefits aren't
| universal, which brings the costs into question.
|
| Nonetheless, for some types of software, writing code
| without using metaprogramming will have several-fold the
| LoC, complexity, etc of the equivalent _with_
| metaprogramming. But if you never developed
| metaprogramming skills, you are unlikely to recognize
| when these opportunities arise. In these cases, you do
| see large productivity multipliers. I see this pattern
| all the time in C++; most C++ developers have no idea how
| much concision (and type safety) metaprogramming enables
| in contexts where it is perfectly suited for the job
| because they never learned metaprogramming in C++, so
| they write vast amounts of brittle boilerplate instead.
|
| I've used metaprogramming in enough languages and
| contexts to recognize it as solving a broad class of
| problems in a general way, but you still want to pick
| your moments because it isn't free. Similarly, garbage
| collection is the right choice for many software
| applications but it isn't free and there are contexts in
| which garbage collection introduces far more complexity
| than is justified by the benefits.
|
| Recognizing these situations and being able to take
| advantage of them is a market opportunity.
| lisper wrote:
| The big wins are in niches that involve a lot of domain-
| specific knowledge. The two best examples that I was
| personally involved with were the NASA Deep Space One
| Remote Agent and the Meta chip design tool from Barefoot
| Networks (acquired by Intel in 2019). In the former case,
| an attempt was made to do the implementation in C++,
| which failed outright. In the latter case you can do a
| pretty direct apples-to-apples comparison of the design
| cycle time relative to off-the-shelf design tools. Meta
| lets you iterate in minutes what would take hours using
| standard tools. (To be fair, Meta does not do everything
| that the standard tools do, and before you can tape-out
| you have to do a few iterations on standard place-and-
| route and timing verification. But it's still a huge win
| over just using those for the entire design.)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > It was only the good fortune of Apple management being
| utterly incompetent that gave him a second chance
|
| Not only: before that second chance, he set up its sensibility,
| as he had the willingness to test the idea that there was a
| growing market for widespread unix 'workstations'.
|
| his hardware was too expensive for a huge hobbyist audience,
| which I know as I had one, but NeXTstep and its tooling and
| resulting apps placed a solid foothold in a somewhat grotesque
| early 90s (from 1988 or so to even get that foothold).
|
| I had one, had been using Suns before, and very early microsoft
| before that, and apple ][ and atari 800. I think his getting
| fired is something his brazen young self sublimed into a
| determination to prove an idea's viability such that an
| evolution of his NeXTstep effort not only brought him back to a
| hardware company better able to execute on the hardware
| portion, but such that his post-firing gamble is evolved into
| things ubiquitous now.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > You have to have the right kind of profound beliefs
|
| We need not to be enormously blind to the existence of an
| entire transactional structure around us.
|
| One that antedated our arrival and will likely still be there
| to offer a sentiments card and flowers upon our departure.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Steve for Objective C or just his design principles in general?
| lisper wrote:
| Steve (Jobs, not Blank) was an unparalleled visionary. I give
| him credit for the Apple II [1], the Mac, Objective C,
| NeXTOS/OSX/MacOS, and the whole i-series from his second
| stint at Apple (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad). To call him an
| overachiever would be quite the understatement. He is truly
| in a class by himself. I can't offhand think of anyone else
| in his league. (Elon Muck comes closest, but I'd rate him a
| very distant second.)
|
| ---
|
| [1] Yes, I know Woz actually designed and built it, but
| Burrell Smith designed the original Mac, and neither of those
| things would have been possible without Jobs.
| growingkittens wrote:
| Steve Jobs was a visionary authoritarian with the
| resources, opportunities, and connections to make Apple
| happen.
|
| Visionary authoritarians are dangerous to glorify.
| lisper wrote:
| I didn't intend to glorify him, only to defend my claim
| that he was an extreme outlier.
| growingkittens wrote:
| Glorification doesn't have to be intentional. Steve Jobs
| left a trail of havoc in the lives of the people he used
| to build Apple. He did objectively bad things to achieve
| objectively good things, so to speak. The good result is
| tightly coupled to a bad technique. Omitting the bad
| technique is tantamount to glorification.
|
| The language in your posts is also very...enthusiastic?
|
| Speaking of hard workers, have you read about Niklas
| Luhmann?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> the whole i-series from his second stint at Apple (iMac,
| iPod, iPhone, iPad)_
|
| Don't forget the iBook and iSight!
|
| And a whole pile of software and services like iTools (with
| its iDisk and iCards), iWork, and most of the iLife suite
| (Garage Band somehow escaped being named iBand).
|
| i all the things!
| gumby wrote:
| > "I was executing a lot of ... "things" but why was I doing
| them?"
|
| This is a general problem, not just a marketing one: people who
| mistake frenzy for action and action for progress.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| I really wish vague no context titles like this wouldn't be
| allowed. I don't know who votes for two words with no other
| information, but it seems silly.
| [deleted]
| dbcurtis wrote:
| It does have context -- it's on Steve Blank's blog. Now, if you
| have never heard of Blank, I suppose it is context-free in that
| sense. But I was expecting an essay riffing on the idea of
| "profound beliefs", and I got exactly that.
|
| I have the same problem with other titles -- the world of
| Javascript front-end frameworks seems to very commonly have a
| name collision with some word or phrase from a context that I
| care about, and then I click through and find web front-end
| stuff, which I care about much, much less than what the cafe is
| serving for lunch. It's just part of the overhead of surfing
| HN. You'll be fine.
| pvg wrote:
| People click and read the thing and upvote it if they like it.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Why have titles at all if they aren't supposed to have any
| information in them?
| pvg wrote:
| Obviously, they have information in them, perhaps not
| information that's to your taste. "Why are titles that are
| not to my taste allowed" is at least a question that's
| relatively simple to figure out.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| First you complain that the title doesn't have enough
| information-more information please! Then you imply there
| should be no titles at all-less information please! Do you
| see the impossible double standard?
| pvg wrote:
| They're saying 'what's the point of titles if they don't
| tell me what's inside the tin.' There's no double
| standard there at all. It's an impossible one (unless
| promoted to Mystic Master of All Titles in The Universe
| or At Least on HN) but there's nothing double about it.
| layer8 wrote:
| The problem, if anything, is that people vote on headlines (or
| on authors) instead of on article content.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, that is why the guidelines are encourage keeping the
| title where possible but are also OK with neutralizing
| clickbait titles.
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