[HN Gopher] Strengths Are Your Weaknesses
___________________________________________________________________
Strengths Are Your Weaknesses
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 259 points
Date : 2025-04-11 09:27 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (terriblesoftware.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (terriblesoftware.org)
| halgir wrote:
| Like how my biggest weakness is that I work too hard.
| jraby3 wrote:
| Maybe that is your biggest weakness.
|
| Maybe working less hard on higher impact things would be
| better. Or maybe you'd be more creative if you didn't work so
| hard.
|
| It's definitely worth exploring.
| smrxx wrote:
| That's funny; My biggest strength is that I don't.
| apercu wrote:
| Might be a tongue cheek comment, but I built my practice
| around this idea. If you're going to do deep thinking work 48
| weeks a year, you simply can't do it effectively 40 hours a
| week. Even a machine needs maintenance down time.
| croisillon wrote:
| for people who haven't seen Trainspotting:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rPOC78NuQk
| npodbielski wrote:
| For yourself? Or your Company? That is big difference.
| mathgeek wrote:
| This is a big weakness of many, many folks. Knowing when to
| work hard(er) and when to take time to recover is important in
| pursuits both mental and physical. You see it all the time in
| sports(e.g. overtraining) and careers (e.g. the father who
| spends his nights at work and misses his kids' events).
| wutwutwat wrote:
| Michael Scott: Why don't I tell you what my greatest weaknesses
| are? I work too hard, I care too much and sometimes I can be too
| invested in my job.
|
| David Wallace: Okay. And your strengths?
|
| Michael Scott: Well, my weaknesses are actually strengths.
|
| David Wallace: Oh. Yes. Very good.
| kylecazar wrote:
| Fun fact, Wallace was a business person they cast. He was a VP
| at Merrill Lynch, and remained so during the course of the
| show.
|
| Imagine reporting to the real life Wallace as a fan of the
| show.
| scott_w wrote:
| This reminds me of the coding interview I had where I completely
| missed a requirement because of my desire to get the code out
| there. Still got the job, so I can't complain!
|
| Great framing of an issue and it's something I'm going to be
| thinking about over the weekend. Thanks for sharing!
| bsenftner wrote:
| This is a good, astute essay providing a useful mental framework
| that can undermine many a developer's innate imposter syndrome.
| The concept of duality is a great discriminator, it is just
| subtle enough that focusing on one's strength as a duality is a
| mind game that distracts from what normally spirals into negative
| self suspicion.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Yup I have realized that too, it's just two faces of the same
| coin. I have also found out that what I really WANT to do is
| usually not something I'm good at.
|
| For example I consider myself good at being a middle man between
| backend and analyst (I work as a data engineer in between)
| because none has the time and interest to communicate with each
| other -- so I usually took up the initiative and clear up things.
| I also work in small companies where people are expected to wear
| multiple hats, so no one gets their toes stepped on. But oh how I
| HATE that part of the job. How I want to get into some low level
| programming which is further from the "stakeholders" and the
| scope is larger than two weeks! Then I did a bit of low level
| projects and found myself not really good at what I want to do --
| at least not good enough to even think about applying for such a
| job where everyone has done projects left and right when they
| were in schools. The mental doesn't help either. I might be able
| to be more productive if I don't need to work or/and don't have a
| family, but I can get rid of none.
| apercu wrote:
| > being a middle man between backend and analyst (I work as a
| data engineer in between) because none has the time and
| interest to communicate with each other -- so I usually took up
| the initiative and clear up things. I also work in small
| companies where people are expected to wear multiple hats, so
| no one gets their toes stepped on.
|
| Just curious if you have ever felt that it's hard to
| demonstrate your value to the organization if you're a "glue"
| guy like that. (I have also worked in several small companies,
| but only as a partner or an executive.)
|
| I've found that the older and more experienced I get, the more
| specificity I want in how the value I provide will be measured.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| > Just curious if you have ever felt that it's hard to
| demonstrate your value to the organization if you're a "glue"
| guy like that. (I have also worked in several small
| companies, but only as a partner or an executive.)
|
| I'm probably the outlier who don't care _too much_ about
| showing my value to my employer as long as they pay me.
| Somehow getting appreciation (whether true-hearted or not) is
| not a huge motivation to me. The reason I moved forward with
| this role was because miscommunication or zero-communication
| bogged down my work and created potential hazards in the
| maintenance phase. I 'd like to remove those obstacles so I
| stepped forward to clean it up. I always protect myself by
| ccing everyone and try to reduce my responsibility in all of
| these -- because it is not clean cut who should do this
| communication type of work.
|
| Maybe that's why I hate it.
| apercu wrote:
| > The reason I moved forward with this role was because
| miscommunication or zero-communication bogged down my work
| and created potential hazards in the maintenance phase. I'd
| like to remove those obstacles so I stepped forward to
| clean it up.
|
| Are you me? I'm a systems thinker and I, too, have to stop
| and analyze workflows and try to "fix" things. Probably why
| I ended up in process/management consulting.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| We probably have the same mindset. Somehow I just want
| things to flow smoothly. I love and hate it though.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > I have also found out that what I really WANT to do is
| usually not something I'm good at
|
| Snap. How I've made this work in my career is being the guy who
| does the shit that nobody knows how to do
| andai wrote:
| This is brilliant! It really is context dependent. There's
| probably exceptions to that though.
|
| I heard an example yesterday that dealt with a more "universally"
| negative trait: a boss gave feedback to a colleague who was
| widely considered an asshole.
|
| Everyone had already told him to stop being an asshole and that
| didn't help at all. That's not actionable.
|
| Instead, they boiled it down to four specific behaviors that
| produced the complaints, and then came up with alternative
| behaviors to execute in those situations.
|
| The complaints went away within a week.
|
| Source: Alex Hormozi
|
| ---
|
| Edit: I've just read a few of the other posts on this blog
| (Terrible Software), they are equally brilliant. Highly
| recommended.
| ovalanche wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what were the 4 behaviours and alternatives?
|
| Using the post's framework, I wonder whether his "assholery"
| had any positive flipsides-- maybe something like speaking
| openly when others (politely) wouldn't?
| mattw2121 wrote:
| The is exactly the advice that one of my favorite podcasts,
| Manager Tools, would prescribe. Don't give feedback about
| emotions or internal feelings, give feedback about behaviors.
| Telling someone they are acting like an asshole can be met
| with, "but, no, I'm not acting like an asshole." Telling
| someone, "When you cut off people mid sentence and speak
| loudly, you will have people complain about you." gives them
| actionable ways to change their external behavior in the
| future. It doesn't matter if they are still an asshole on the
| inside.
| ansisjdjsjs wrote:
| Do these places ever discuss receiving feedback? Genuinely
| actioning feedback like this requires an extremely high level
| of trust, and expecting that level of trust in a short time
| window is borderline predatory.
|
| For example, I would never provide critical feedback within
| the first 6 months (minimum) of a new hire starting (similar
| window I apply to providing feedback on codebase issues etc).
| sdjcse1 wrote:
| I've seen the duality helping in some cases and being a problem.
| IMO, the problem part essentially arises when your trait overruns
| the goals / priorities of the business or your manager is
| ineffective in communicating the right thing to you. Business
| usually looks for realized impact as a metric
| weard_beard wrote:
| My brain is waterfall in an agile world.
|
| Strength: Seeing the bigger picture and the ability to hold an
| entire system in my head along with the context of prior projects
| and the body of knowledge I've built. I can build large complex
| enterprise systems in my mind all at once and articulate the
| principles and patterns involved to my peers and clients.
|
| Weakness: I am often frustrated and upset when I don't have
| enough information to do this and will wait and procrastinate
| until I have enough information to form this system fully in my
| mind, then build or design or document a thing all at once.
|
| I am perceived by my peers to be a, "slow" developer so I got
| "Peter Principle"'d into a Solution Architect and consultant.
|
| My coping mechanism to handle this when I do agile development
| with peers is, when working with incomplete information, develop
| many versions of the same partial system in my head. A/B test
| them and extrapolate from incomplete information the most likely
| complete system.
|
| Then build that version.
| apercu wrote:
| That's because you are likely a perfectionist. I've learned to
| let go and allow for there to be holes in my work (because 90%
| of my projects should be linear after requirements are known,
| but we live in a fantasy world where you're expected to put the
| shingles on the roof before the walls and roof are built).
| weard_beard wrote:
| Perfectionism is just a nice way to say, "conflict avoidant"
| :-)
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Count yourself lucky you can clearly demarcate the start and
| end of your system. You view this beautiful system moving in
| your mind in splendid isolation dancing in synchronized dare I
| say celestial harmony.
|
| What I see is that same thing and then I zoom out and see it
| embedded in an endless barn full of pig shit with all sorts of
| oddly dressed people shouting at each other. In this pig farm
| your beautiful celestial system is a small pearl, lying
| somewhere on the ground in a corner.
|
| Try to bring _that_ into harmony.
| weard_beard wrote:
| I've... had to adapt to similar circumstances. Separate data
| sanitization from other problems. Ignore "prioritization" as
| an activity you can control. Walk up to the first responsible
| party you can find, and do your best, "Robin Williams as the
| Genie in Alladin" impression.
|
| _poof_ what do you need?
|
| _poof_ what do you need?
|
| _poof_ what do you need?
|
| Keep going until you end up with a manageable set of
| problems.
| ddawson wrote:
| I'm so happy i work on a team. Early in my career I substituted
| my speed for what I saw as deep experience of others around me. I
| was the one willing to move fast and break things and I'm still
| doing that. Fortunately, I've learned to temper my eagerness by
| teaming up with others willing to probe my approach. I'm still
| impatience and eager but I'm much, much stronger in a team than
| as a lone cowboy.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I've said something similar for a while. That dual interview
| question "what is your greatest strength? what is your greatest
| weakness" is a very bad question.
|
| Your strengths and weaknesses are joined at the hip, and they are
| the two sides of the same coin which is your personality.
|
| In some contexts, your personality becomes a strength. In other
| contexts it becomes a weakness.
|
| The trick is whether you are able to recognise under what
| circumstances your personality becomes a strength, and what you
| then do to allow you to play to your strengths, and maximize its
| effect, or obversely, whether you are able to recognise under
| what circumstances your personality becomes a weakness, and what
| kind of external mitigations do you or have you then put in
| place, to minimize the effect of that weakness.
|
| So in that sense, the typical "I work too hard" passive-
| aggressive response is a bad response. A good response would be
| that you tend to be a hard worker, which is good when you need to
| be relied upon, but bad in terms of having work-life balance and
| getting easily burnt out. Hence the external mitigations should
| be a clearly negotiated work package which insists on sticking to
| work hours and allocated holidays.
|
| Or, another example, adaptability. Adaptability is great if the
| role requires it. But it's a curse if you find yourself becoming
| the "go to" man for all bunch of unrelated things, which then
| distract you from your number 1 task and opportunities for
| growth. So the mitigation strategy is a clearly defined role and
| responsibilities.
| devsda wrote:
| > That dual interview question "what is your greatest strength?
| what is your greatest weakness" is a very bad question.
|
| Is there a 'right' answer to this question that's honest and
| isn't phony ?
| tpoacher wrote:
| Yes. Pointing out that strengths and weaknesses are the two
| sides of the same coin, as above. And then proceeding to talk
| about your strengths while identifying when they can turn
| into weaknesses, and how you mitigate those situations.
| hliyan wrote:
| Better formulated as: _some_ weaknesses may be unintended
| consequences of your strengths under certain conditions. Rules of
| thumb like this are useful approximations of reality, but I
| wouldn 't elevate them to the level of a principle that I would
| use in 1:1s. All the little phenomena that people like the author
| (myself included) in the tech/management world have observed and
| written about, would probably add up to several thousand. Human
| behaviour is complex. Sometimes you have no choice but to handle
| it on a case by case basis.
| lolinder wrote:
| This isn't like most of the trite management tidbits you're
| comparing it to. All they're really observing is that there are
| no such things as "strengths" and "weaknesses" in the absence
| of context--there are only traits, and those traits may be
| useful, neutral, or counterproductive depending on the
| situation.
|
| This principle shouldn't really be controversial because it's
| basically a law of nature. It's why small mammals took over
| from large reptiles after the asteroid hit. It's why New
| Zealand's flightless birds thrived until the introduction of
| the cat. Enormous size and cold bloodedness were an advantage
| until the climate changed. There was no need to waste energy on
| wings when there was no predator to eat you. Nature doesn't
| have a concept of strengths and weaknesses, nature has a
| concept of fittedness for a given environment, and we see the
| same thing with individual humans.
| patcon wrote:
| This was the push back on parent comment that I was hoping to
| find, against the misguided qualifier. Thanks. Strongly
| agree.
|
| All weaknesses are strengths in the right context. Yea,
| perhaps the context simply doesn't exist in the world we
| maintain, but we can unreservedly acknowledge it's definitely
| in the "latent space of culture" :)
| appleorchard46 wrote:
| This is off-topic but I just wanted to say I appreciate your
| presence on HN. I see your name pop up often, and your
| comments are always insightful and clear. You consistently
| identify the root of complex topics (and
| disagreements/misapprehensions surrounding them) and are able
| to distill them in a non-argumentative way. Thanks for
| helping make this site a nicer place.
| lolinder wrote:
| Thanks for saying so!
| jrowen wrote:
| _All they 're really observing is that there are no such
| things as "strengths" and "weaknesses"_
|
| I don't think that's totally accurate, the article is very
| clear about the "duality" and "two sides of the same coin"
| concept. "No such things" dilutes it to something that may be
| a law of nature but that also approaches a tautology.
|
| I agree with some of the comments picking the original post
| apart a bit, that the reality is more nuanced. "Coding speed"
| and "occasionally overlooking details" don't seem so cut-and-
| dried to me as two sides of a duality. Coding speed is the
| sum of a number of factors, one of which can definitely be
| just straight up being able to reason about things and get to
| a solution faster. Occasionally overlooking details is a
| symptom of rushing, which does relate to coding speed, but to
| me does not serve as a great example of the "strength =
| weakness" duality.
|
| I also don't know if major evolutionary shifts over millenia
| are a totally apt metaphor for iterated situations involving
| the same individual human psyche. I feel like you zoomed out
| and generalized a bit much, which made it less controversial.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Sometimes it's hard to convince people that this works in reverse
| too. Traits like lack of commitment or emotional distance from
| work also means they'll be less affected when the org goes in
| pure chaos mode or the work is boring as hell.
|
| Diversity is also about these kind of differences inside the org.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Haha this rings true for me. I am _far_ less emotionally
| invested in my work than most of my peers, and as a result have
| a reputation for unflappability and being able to get along
| with everyone
| m463 wrote:
| lazy engineers automate stuff better :)
| agentultra wrote:
| In my experience, people aren't so static as to have dualities.
| They don't fit so neatly into little descriptors.
|
| What is a strength? Something you are inherently talented at? A
| skill you have plenty of experience with? A subject you have a
| lot of knowledge of? What you are motivated by?
|
| What is a weakness?
|
| I see that most people are rather adaptable to context. When
| you're working at a startup building an app make AI complete your
| Uber orders for you, there's no reason to be focused on making
| sure the system is scalable to a million requests per second.
| Most people tend to understand that. They may have a lot of
| experience building highly scalable backend systems, they may
| _want_ to build another system like that again because it pleases
| them to do so. But most people will see the forest for the trees
| and focus on getting the project out the door in the fastest way
| possible because they probably won 't have a million customers
| for a long time... if at all.
|
| I tend to look for what people _value_ when building a team. You
| 'll need to match the set-intersection of the teams' values with
| the goals of the business. People are motivated to work on thing
| they value. We can tolerate working on things we don't but try to
| avoid doing that for too long. So if the business needs a highly
| reliable system because failures can lose their customers
| millions of dollars a minute for downtime then you'll want to
| stock your team with developers that value those things the
| company cares about.
|
| What you're good at today can change tomorrow. You can be better
| at it. It's a skill, it's knowledge, it's something you can
| acquire: it's not an attribute or trait of you as a person.
| uoaei wrote:
| Yes, the world is more complicated than any description of it.
| No, that doesn't make heuristics useless.
|
| The trick is to understand that heuristics are approximations
| and not to replace the territory with the map.
| agentultra wrote:
| Some heuristics are better than others.
| linguistbreaker wrote:
| "all models are wrong, but some are useful"
|
| - George E Box
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I came across this idea after a dark period of meditation:
| creativity is the productive use of rumination, anxiety or mania.
| The best creators I know (offhand example, Heston Blumenthal) had
| rampant mental illness during their most creative periods. I
| myself suffer from clinical anxiety periodically, which I have to
| manage proactively.
|
| It's very sobering to realize you have to take the bad with the
| good, and sometimes it's not worth it. Being average isn't so
| bad.
| the_arun wrote:
| In the example used, I don't think strength (speed) is the same
| trait causing weakness (overlooking).
|
| Collaborative development might have minimized the risk of the
| production issue.
|
| * Design is not reviewed by other team members
|
| * Coding is not reviewed by other team members
|
| * Not proper automated testing (if it was a regression issue)
|
| * Finally, speed with accuracy is what we need to focus on, while
| training/practicing ourselves. This comes with experience.
|
| So it is a minor tweak we need to make.
| crdrost wrote:
| But surely you have seen that places which practice design
| reviews and code reviews and double down on building tests,
| tend to be slower shippers and deadline missers?
|
| Not saying that you in your ideal company suffer this problem,
| just the vast majority of the people who have taken your
| advice...
|
| I come to you with a major refactor, +400 lines -600 lines, so
| like if you printed it out it's a 25-page diff, if someone is
| now reviewing my design or coding, they potentially have half
| an hour to an hour's work trying to fully understand this and
| make sure that I didn't break anything in that refactor. Post-
| hoc ain't the way here. I sometimes feel like I'm the only
| person who will read through such a long diff and understand it
| and come up with useful feedback. Everybody else is going to
| lean on testing, which to be fair to you is one of your bullet
| points, but consider that it's one of the major points.
|
| And why did the refactor get that big in the first place?
| Because of the merge latencies, because of the review process.
| The more resistance you place here, the more gets buffered into
| a feature branch, and the more you have to review later.
|
| Some shops do well with that, I worked at one once, we actually
| worked ourselves out of a job by finishing everything ahead of
| deadlines. (We were making a game that wasn't very fun at a
| company that was not principally interested in making games, so
| we were forcing the issue to a head of whether they wanted to
| keep taking this risk with a dream team of programmers or cut
| their losses and double down on their core.) But the major
| thing that we were doing different, has nothing to do with your
| bullet points. In the abstract, it was that, we didn't have
| performance review hanging over our heads. And therefore we
| didn't have every single developer working on their own
| separate thing in the system, so that they could call it their
| own and claim it on paper at PerfTime. Which meant that we
| could pair program organically, "hey you mind if I look over
| your shoulder?". We all merged into dev, everyday, multiple
| times a day, and that's how we saw that someone else was
| working on the same part of the code that we were working on,
| and then we talked about like how are we going to not step on
| each other's feet? We had also decided early on that we were
| going to have a centralized place to push out feature toggles,
| it was kind of janky but it was available for QA department,
| yes we had a separate QA department, so that they could tweak
| which things were going to go out versus which needed to be
| baked more.
| the_arun wrote:
| We always need to think what is important - speed or zero
| incidents. I'm not saying what is right, but we have the
| decision to make. If your outcome is zero incidents - there
| is effort involved. If our goal is time to market/speed, we
| need to take the risk of incidents. There are always trade
| offs with every approach we take.
| hobofan wrote:
| > In the example used, I don't think strength (speed) is the
| same trait causing weakness (overlooking).
|
| Yeah, I think so too. I think the core points are that the
| article makes are very reasonable ones, that deserve a better
| example (and there are certainly attributes of people that act
| as a double edged sword).
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| The only context for my weakness being a strength is running
| operations or my own business, or high-level architecture. My
| preference is for not being detail-oriented, but I rally to do
| that when I have to, which is often when troubleshooting code. I
| have to break down the problem and simplify it, not just to be
| effective but to keep motivated.
| munificent wrote:
| This is a good insight, though I wouldn't limit it to software
| engineering.
|
| I've discussed with my therapist many times that my biggest
| mental health challenges are from the exact same personality
| traits that bring me my greatest joy and value. Every maladaptive
| trait has its adaptive aspects and vice versa. If I were to try
| to eliminate those maladaptive aspects, I'd probably lose much of
| the adaptive side as well.
|
| There is a real zen to being able to note that the things which
| cause the most anguish also cause the most joy and accepting both
| sides of that coin at the same time.
| copperx wrote:
| That is the premise of the "Feeling Great" book and its CBT
| approach. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54930681-feeling-
| great
| munificent wrote:
| Haha, yes! I've been (slowly) reading that book. :)
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I guess this is a relatively common observation nowadays
| https://medium.com/luminasticity/your-greatest-strength-is-y...
| gnuser wrote:
| Wow, I hadn't thought of it like that before. I've recently been
| finding real insights in such reframing.
| rkowal wrote:
| 100% true and research backs this up: strengths are also risks
| (or weaknesses). - If you're very disagreeable you will offend
| people, but at the same time hold your ground (important in high
| impact roles). - If you're very driven, you might tend to
| dominate people. - If you're very flexible, you might be
| impulsive.
|
| and so on.
|
| Try this https://www.gyfted.me/personality-quiz/strengthsfinder-
| test-... or this https://www.gyfted.me/quiz-landing/bfas-
| personality-test to learn more about your strengths/traits
| iamwil wrote:
| The article mentioned speed of dev as a trait that's both a
| strength and a weakness. I suppose the opposite of that is
| quality orientated, but not very fast.
|
| What are other dimensions along which there's this duality of
| strength/weakness in engineers (or even in the general workplace)
| that you've seen either in yourself or other coworkers?
| zackmorris wrote:
| If we're comparing prolific programmers with pragmatic
| programmers, I wonder if there's an analog on the management
| side?
|
| I look at our leaders today - our CEOS, elected officials,
| presidents and their lieutenants like Elon Musk - and I see a
| narrow sampling of humanity chosen for high executive function
| but little else. Who consider humanity's greatest virtues like
| empathy to be liabilities. Where is the self-awareness, the
| doubt, even the shame that brings wisdom?
|
| I worry that this tireless race towards maximization of
| efficiency and reduction of cost above all else is driving the
| whole world towards ensh@ttification. When we could so easily
| take a step back, breathe, and find outside-the-box solutions
| beyond the zero-sum game of the status quo. If only they would
| let us..
| huijzer wrote:
| > Where is the self-awareness, the doubt, even the shame that
| brings wisdom?
|
| There is a book Investing Between the Lines by Rittenhouse that
| argues that candor is a high predictor for company
| outperformance. Buffett for example has written on multiple
| occasions things like "this was fully my mistake" or "it turned
| out I was wrong". With the book in the back of my mind, I set
| out to find annual reports were the letters showed candor
| instead of the typical "Among a greatly turbulent economy, we
| have maintained good revenue numbers and customer satisfaction"
| rhetoric.
|
| I have read about 100 reports and found one or two satisfying
| this criterium. From the top of my head, only Berskhire, Amazon
| in the 2000s, and Ryanair conduct candor communication.
|
| So yes I fully agree with your point on candor and self-
| awareness.
| huijzer wrote:
| For example, Buffett in the 1989 letter:
|
| Last summer we sold the corporate jet that we purchased for
| $850,000 three years ago and bought another used jet for $6.7
| million. Those of you who recall the mathematics of the
| multiplying bacteria on page 5 will understandably panic: If
| our net worth continues to increase at current rates, and the
| cost of replacing planes also continues to rise at the now-
| established rate of 100% compounded annually, it will not be
| long before Berkshire's entire net worth is consumed by its
| jet.
|
| Charlie doesn't like it when I equate the jet with bacteria;
| he feels it's degrading to the bacteria. His idea of
| traveling in style is an air-conditioned bus, a luxury he
| steps up to only when bargain fares are in effect. My own
| attitude toward the jet can be summarized by the prayer
| attributed, apocryphally I'm sure, to St. Augustine as he
| contemplated leaving a life of secular pleasures to become a
| priest. Battling the conflict between intellect and glands,
| he pled: "Help me, Oh Lord, to become chaste - but not yet."
|
| Naming the plane has not been easy. I initially suggested
| "The Charles T. Munger." Charlie countered with "The
| Aberration." We finally settled on "The Indefensible."
| w10-1 wrote:
| Yes, and more importantly...
|
| Strengths are weaknesses because they create a bias to use the
| strength rather than developing a weak alternate, and you only
| get better at what you do - creating a virtuous cycle that can
| quickly turn vicious.
|
| This will happen whenever growth is mediated mainly by feedback
| loops. (Think hard about that!)
|
| The solution is instead to have a model of what you're trying to
| grow, whether it's a company or a positive presence in the world,
| and be willing to sacrifice to make that happen.
| mfitton wrote:
| I'm not sure that follows from this article. In fact, I think
| the logical conclusion of the article is that, by trying to
| grow (address weaknesses and turn them into strengths) you're
| actually creating strengths, which in turn creates a weakness.
|
| I think it's possible to grow in positive outcomes of
| behaviors, but I also think this article is trying to get at
| something intrinsic within each one of us. Identifying where
| our personality quirks lead to strengths and weaknesses, and
| accepting that, is related but not quite the same as
| identifying concrete positive and negative outcomes of
| behavior, and trying to change our behaviors to align more to
| the positive outcomes.
|
| Not sure if the link I'm trying to make here will be clear,
| but... I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other
| day. She conceives of who she is largely through the behaviors
| she expresses, a kind of de facto self-definition. I tend to
| have a self-conception that's a little bit more abstract and
| rooted as much in my feelings, thoughts, with some aspirational
| quality, that my behaviors sometimes live up to, and other
| times don't.
| hammock wrote:
| >I'm not sure that follows from this article.
|
| I can see how. In the example given, the strength of coding
| speed is created via a bias against careful review of edge
| cases. When it works (most of the time) , you increase your
| coding speed and reduce review of edge cases even more, until
| something blows up
|
| The interesting insight from the article is that a coder is
| not an inflexible monolith - they can vary the expression of
| a "strength/weakness" pair (strength/weakness being a
| misnomer at this point in the argument) to suit the
| circumstances
| tomnipotent wrote:
| I see this a lot in hero shooters, like Overwatch and Marvel
| Rivals. A hero you're great at but is bad for the job is worse
| than a hero you're bad at but is good for the job. It's funny
| to watch people complain "But I'm not good with X!" then they
| switch and are at the top of the leaderboard.
| scott_w wrote:
| There's a school of thought in management where you get your
| team to lean into their strengths and find ways to mitigate
| their weaknesses, rather than spend much time on them. The idea
| is, if you're a person who moves quickly vs going super deep on
| every possible use case, you'll always be shit at going super
| deep (I know I am), so you're better off getting even faster
| and pairing with a deep investigator to cover your blind spot.
| And vice versa, of course.
| maujun wrote:
| This may be one reason employees have different titles. The
| other reason I can think of is why owners aren't usually
| called employees.
|
| Some believe we eliminated the need for this school of
| thought through the DevOps revolution of the 2010s. Dev and
| Ops became one, married in the form of one man with one job
| in one company in one world. That was when history and
| current became one, and the many problems became zero.
| dijit wrote:
| Dev and Ops are natural enemies because they are focusing
| in pulling in opposite directions, a fact thats repeated ad
| infinitum in the course material surrounding devops - yet
| people still hold the belief that one person can fiercely
| hold two diametrically opposed positions at once and
| succeed.
|
| With that mentality, why have lawyers for a prosecution and
| defence? Just have a judge decide.. right?
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| I think this also happens at the company level. You get good at
| delivering a certain type of solution using a set of
| technologies. You build excellent infrastructure and expertise
| using these, which is a strength!
|
| However, without active effort to build capability in
| strategically important areas, your weaknesses can ruin you.
|
| It works at the personal and company level. I'm the deep
| thinker/researcher type. At my age, that's all for the good
| because you go up through the ranks until that's a very
| valuable attribute. When I was younger though, I had to work
| hard on time-boxing and delivering the "good enough"; skills
| that are still vital when planning at the large scale.
|
| The strengths and weaknesses are indeed two sides of the same
| coin.
| karmakaze wrote:
| How can having a comprehensive understanding of your
| infrastructure/stack be a weakness exactly?
|
| My high-level view of backend development is to make functions
| that transform one persisted consistent state to another. Define
| the start/end states and all the code that's used to do that is
| implementation detail. The other part is fast reads of same.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > How can having a comprehensive understanding of your
| infrastructure/stack be a weakness exactly?
|
| Weakness in the inverse: not being ready to change to new code,
| because you have a clear and distinct understanding of the old,
| and an uncertain take on the new. In that case, even if the new
| were better objectively, it would be discounted for you by
| uncertainty.
|
| Conversely, if you understand something complex deeply and
| newbies don't, to them something that's easy to understand (but
| defers problems your stack solves) is preferable, and you end
| up with culture and governance issues. Managers who are
| relatively ignorant then set up competitions to surface issues,
| validate claims, and develop alternatives to mitigate their
| reliance risks on employees.
|
| So: move fast and forget things, and expect a fight :)
| lawn wrote:
| > How can having a comprehensive understanding of your
| infrastructure/stack be a weakness exactly?
|
| It may cause you to favor complex solutions that are obvious to
| you, but inscrutable to people without your deep knowledge.
|
| This is very common with people who are very skilled at a
| complex tool (such as C++ or Kubernetes).
| spitfire wrote:
| Success is a cruel mistress.
|
| Outsized success a curse.
| hinkley wrote:
| Layoffs caused by companies fishtailing because they don't know
| when to stop hiring people as fast as they can place them.
| Always a bad time.
| cjcenizal wrote:
| If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live
| its whole life believing that it is stupid.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| there should be a word for that horrible feeling when you realize
| that the things you love about yourself and the things you can't
| stand about yourself are all just yourself
| pentamassiv wrote:
| My professor always said: "The sum of the problems is constant"
|
| You can code faster, but then you might overlook things. You can
| work a lot and earn a lot of money, but you might struggle with
| nurturing your friendships. You can have a partner but then
| you'll have arguments with them. You can remain single but then
| you'll have to deal with loneliness.
| trash_cat wrote:
| Isn't that quite a pessimistic view though? Of course there
| will always be something that irks you, but that does not mean
| you can't be fulfilled at some point in life and be aware that
| you are really happy and there is nothing you would change.
| pentamassiv wrote:
| I think it depends on your perspective. You can think of it
| as pessimistic or optimistic. An optimistic view would be:
| There will always be problems, but I can deal with them.
| Everyone else also has problems. No matter the decisions I
| made, there is no reason to have regrets.
|
| It helps me to know that the richest, most attractive or
| smartest person alive has the same amount of problems. It's
| just part of life and I am happy
| procaryote wrote:
| It's pretty obviously wrong though. People aren't zero-sum
| creatures of perfect balance.
|
| There are plenty of slow coders who overlook more things than
| some fast coders. Plenty of people not working a lot who still
| struggle to nurture friendships, and so on.
| MetaMalone wrote:
| I think strengths are more difficult to define than weaknesses,
| because they are very context dependent. "Speed" may be useful in
| certain situations, but in many cases "speed" can be harmful in
| more ways than just overlooking details. You miss out on
| opportunities to learn, to ask for help, to become better at
| thinking critically as a software engineer.
|
| What the idea of "strengths being weaknesses" reflects is how
| much we identify with our present state of ability. It seems like
| we get it backwards. We ask our jobs to fit us as people, rather
| than how we as individuals can become best for the job.
| tonijn wrote:
| Welk tbh there's no need to quote Steve Jobs to get that insight
| kwakubiney wrote:
| I think this goes in line with companies as a whole as well. I
| work at a place where features are pushed at a very very high
| speed and we have realized that the tradeoff is us missing pretty
| crucial edge cases in our development. Now i'm not sure if people
| have worked in a place where they shipped products fast but were
| able to minimize bugs but i'd love to hear how your company
| achieved that. Is it even possible? Does it all come down to
| hiring to suit your fast paced needs?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| it depends on the business and industry. at some phases in a
| business's life you need to get features out more than
| stability. some industries are more sensitive to bugs than
| others. it's not a one size fits all approach.
|
| to shift the culture from "fast" to "safe" is mostly a team-
| based effort because not all teams need to shift. and even
| within a team you may have experimental and mature products.
|
| i've seen this shift happen successfully multiple times. it
| must come from leadership. C-level and down. even if it's just
| for one team. or one product. you need the buy in all the way
| up. and then your people in the chain will adapt to changing
| expectations
| calebio wrote:
| Is it fair to say that also in your experience, those crucial
| edge cases/misses accumulate over time, making it even harder
| to ship things?
|
| I've found this a lot in data systems where folks glue stuff
| together as fast as possible to "ship", while missing the huge
| glaring issues with the foundation that they've built on top of
| wet, sliding mud.
| kwakubiney wrote:
| Yeah pretty fair to say. The company is in a domain where
| accuracy is very important and crucial because we deal with
| people's money, but most products are also in a market where
| competition is high so moves must be made quickly.I have not
| been there for long but it seems in the beginning, the
| foundation laid because of fast shipping culture has caused
| all these problems.
| inactiveseller wrote:
| Interest side of the story. I was trained in kung fu - wing
| chunwith a little group in Guadalajara, Mexico. Really good ideas
| , resistance and trainging.
|
| One of the VERY FEW Verbal classes was this. "Sometimes you dont
| know the weakness of your enemy and have not time to research. As
| A Rule of thumb, their biggest strngth, is thei great weakness".
|
| Examples of the real life. 1 ) i was being filmed in the street
| with a Handcam from seven people of a destructive cult, i cited
| they call to their followers to do that in a forum. I was Filmed
| INSIDe the police station too. Losers. The principal proof to the
| fact they were a destructive cult ? The filmation
|
| 2 ) In my job in a public university some admin had the
| exclusibve right/permissions to put the SSL in the servers
| structure. We needdo a internal memorandum each three months and
| they took a whole week to do so. 50-60 people cant use the
| system. I got some interns and ask them to put an auto renewi SSL
| in a vultr instance, they can do in 15 minutes or less. Then,
| each blackout i only pass the info they are doing late a job than
| a simple intern/advanced student can automate in 15 minutes. They
| pedantic strength, was later the reason i get a promotion myself
| for report the solutions THREE years before.
|
| 3 ) In a divorce case, in mexico, a friend was asked as a part of
| that a 800 USD MONTHLY Bill for therapist of their exwife sons fo
| r a whole year. (stepsons of them),. The lawyer, exwife and
| therapist say that mutltiple times. Ok. Then we ask for the IRS
| equivalent invoice, and go for perjury by the lawyer, therapist
| and exwife for simulated operations (no irs invoice, all are
| lyieng and cometting fraud). The judge himself is currently near
| to be revoked for fraud in evidence. But was very STRONG the
| scandal they do when fake the therapist invoice ina onfficial
| document.
| m463 wrote:
| This is true.
|
| - like in the example, fast people have trouble going slow.
|
| - people who are exceptional at details might be poor at big-
| picture.
|
| - super passionate people can take criticism of their ideas
| personally
|
| - people who are slow might be steady
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