
Things Many People Find Too Obvious to Have Told You Already - JoshTriplett
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306
======
macawfish
> Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-
> working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances.
> This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably
> proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

This one. Every job I see when I go looking is 40+ hrs a week, likely with
plenty of idle time and projects I don't believe in. Part of this is
regional... my area is packed full of marketing jobs that I'm actively
uninterested in. Anyway, I'm starting to get the hang of selling myself to
contract shops, and I think I've found some twinkles of hope.

But today I was told straight up that my resume wasn't conventional enough,
that it was too well-rounded. After quite a few messages back and forth, I'm
not even sure if they even looked at my portfolio. They told me there was no
money for me, because their funders were looking for someone more
professional. So I took this as a sign that maybe this wasn't the job for me.
No need to go barking up the wrong tree.

In the game dev world, I'd probably be a "technical artist", but even that
doesn't quite fit for me. I'm like a "fool of all trades, jack of some, maybe
a master of one or two". But it's hard to find a job that motivates me and
leaves me with adequate space/time/energy to keep myself sharp and alive.

 _If anyone knows of funding for a guy that makes creative, reusable web
components, let me know_... _edit_ : _I just saw that vue.js is primarily
funded by patreon. that 's awesome!_

~~~
rhaps0dy
I think you framed your anecdotal evidence as supporting the OP's statement,
but also that you misunderstood such statement; and you actually present
evidence against it. If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist
positions, _and_ you're a generalist as you claim, then you would find it
_easy_ to get a job.

~~~
csours
There is a massive gulf between hiring and work. There's another massive gulf
between what a manager asks for and what HR or recruiters ask for.

> _" If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions"_

The process of hiring for this is hard. Finding people like this is also hard.

~~~
pm
There's also gulf a between what companies think they need, and what they
actually need. Almost everyone hires on technologies and not the abstract
skillsets required to learn said technologies.

~~~
namibj
Any Idea how to find a company that hires on that abstract skillset,
potentially by throwing one into cold water to test for it?

~Someone with little resume-driven experience but good grogging skills

~~~
aalleavitch
Honestly, the way I got hired recently was by just reading job postings and
cramming on the frameworks mentioned in them until I was competent enough to
pass an interview/coding challenge. I’m a little peeved that it was
essentially company training on my dime, and you have to count on companies
not refusing to hire unless you have x years, but it did get me hired.

------
wnoise
> CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming
> a programmer should involve doing material actual programming.

Well, that's because CS programs are designed to teach CS, not to be a
vocational school for programmers.

~~~
drewrv
I've been spending a lot of time lately wondering if people who treat colleges
and universities as though their job is worker training are confused, or if
I'm naive in believing colleges and universities exist to expand human
knowledge through research and education.

I suspect the answer is that our culture is confused, we want people who are
smart and well rounded to also be useful. And the ugly side of it is, we want
clear class divisions. One would never refer to law school or medical school
as "vocational".

~~~
toasterlovin
Higher education is used as a proxy for intelligence by companies who are
hiring because they are not allowed to use IQ tests. So I think it kind of
makes sense that our society is confused about the purpose of higher
education.

~~~
jogjayr
> because they are not allowed to use IQ tests

There's actual employment law that prohibits using IQ tests? I'd never heard
that before

~~~
ramses0
It's related to anti-discrimination / "psychology-test" laws. If there is any
sort of "test" given as a condition of employment, it must be relevant,
standardized, non-biased, reviewed by specialists and approved, etc.

[http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/Test1...](http://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/07/Test1.jpg.CROP_.article920-large.jpg)

The value and definition of "IQ" is widely disputed and generally seen as of
limited relevance to the actual work and performance of that work
(uncorrelated). Look it up and do some research if you're interested, this is
just a quick showing of _why_ tests may be considered bad.

~~~
majormajor
One day I wonder if some lawyer will strike it big by making an argument that
looking at universities is discrimination because e.g. family connections and
wealth give you a big leg up in getting into certain elite schools...

~~~
toasterlovin
Yeah, but most universities engage in affirmative action, which theoretically
negates this.

------
zbentley
> People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are
> done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run.
> These are simultaneously true.

This is really, really important. In my experience, this is not just _unknown_
but _actively ignored and disagreed with_ (either explicitly or effectively)
by a large majority of people involved in software businesses. This
hamstrings: companies, individuals' growth, and the advancement of the state
of the art.

~~~
shostack
There's also often a messy transition period where a team goes from a bunch of
generalists to more specialists. This can be extremely rocky for all involved
as often generalists have lots of historic operational knowledge and strong
opinions, but the new specialists come with external knowledge of best
practices and how to scale.

It is important that historic knowledge is respected for the context it
provides, while outside knowledge is equally respected for the deeper context
and data behind it.

Unfortunately, this change often means generalists lose jobs in favor of
specialists as a company grows if there isn't a good place for them, or if
they don't rise to management. In fact, even early managers can be displaced
by outside managers who come in with more management experience. And this is
not inherently a bad thing for the company (while it may be for the employee
getting bumped). The people that take a company from point A to point B are
rarely the same people that take it from point B to point C.

~~~
majormajor
Am I crazy to think that generalists are the best-suited engineers to making
the managerial move? You can keep a good broad knowledge base sufficient to be
useful in early directional discussions, and sufficient to sniff out a lot of
(not all) BS artists and identify which specialists to listen to/loop in, in
less time than it would take a specialist to do the same in terms of juggling
things across team, due to the nature of the generalism skill.

I think otherwise trying to be a "senior generalist" or "staff generalist" is
going to be very hard, but for logical reasons.

~~~
rocqua
Being a tech generalist is a great background for a manager. But there are
some caveats.

Firstly, besides understanding the work, a manager also has to be able to
actually manage subordinates. This is orthogonal to technical ability.
Secondly, internal promotion of a generalist carries risk of that generalist
being too opinionated based on his own work. They are much more likely to be a
conservative force. This might be an unnecessary barrier to good changes.

~~~
softawre
Great comment. I found these problems in myself as I transitioned into
management years ago. I was blocking good changes...

These days I try to just be a tie-breaker for the team, instead of laying out
the plan and looking for "feedback".

------
drewrv
> Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth
> because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized
> companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.

A corollary to this is that if you're fundraising and can get debt, you should
take it over equity almost every time. Many founders are skeptical of debt
because everyone takes equity, yet everyone takes equity because it's all they
can get.

At the very least, if you're seriously trying to decide between the two,
remember that equity investors want at least a 10x return within about five
years. Break out a calculator and look at what the interest rate on that would
be (spoilers, it's higher than any lender would think to ask).

~~~
vm
No no no. Debt is not universally better. Debt can wipe out companies. It
requires payments that equity does not. Miss one payment and you're in
default. It's extremely risky for companies that are young and volatile.

Debt vs. equity is always a case-by-case situation. Debt is cheaper but comes
with strings attached. Equity is pricey but more flexible.

~~~
simonbyrne
But it isn't in your creditor's interest that you go bankrupt either.

~~~
emsy
This. Being able to get debt should, in general, be a good indicator that your
company might actually be valuable.

~~~
saas_co_de
Not really. The easiest way to get a loan is to start a fast food franchise or
build houses. Banks don't do innovation.

------
claudiulodro
> The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits
> among consumers

This was a profound revelation I didn't realize until I read it just now.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. have all done so well by starting a habit for
their users. ("Check Facebook daily to see what your friends are up to."
"Google it whenever you need info." "Buy your stuff conveniently on Amazon
when you don't want to go to the store.")

I think this approach can work great for even non-tech industries. It
definitely worked for Starbucks ("Gotta get my morning Starbucks").

I think lots of industries are ripe for "habit-ifying", and I'm going to
pursue that further. Brilliant insight.

~~~
eponeponepon

        > I think lots of industries are ripe 
        > for "habit-ifying", and I'm going 
        > to pursue that further. Brilliant 
        > insight.
    

This is, of course, the same insight that the gambling and tobacco industries
and cults thrive on.

Not talking you down - just reminding you never to forget the moral angle.

~~~
r00fus
Is it a moral issue if the habit a starts a virtuous cycle? Like my Apple
Watch making me exercise more?

~~~
aalleavitch
It's pretty important to be constantly evaluating the ethical implications of
what you're producing. I can't speak for larger companies, but I get the
impression that ethics in software development is not nearly as emphasized as
it should be. Even the tech guys/gals should be highly concerned with how
their product affects their users' overall well-being (or the well-being of
those around their users). In fact, they're a critical layer in protecting
against unethical business practices given they're the ones actually
implementing things and mediating the user's experience on a ground level.
Small features in your product can have significant repercussions on the lives
of many users given how these things scale. What could be a few lines of code
to you could be something that millions of people end up being influenced by
hundreds of times a day.

------
michaelbuckbee
Slightly off topic, but I didn't realize that this was a series of tweets (a
thread) that was extracted and re-presented as a coherent essay.

This explains the somewhat "weird" cadence.

On topic: it makes a lot of sense.

~~~
lexicality
Oh, that explains why it's so weird. I thought it was some kind of extra-terse
blog until I saw your comment.

------
dwaltrip
This should be titled "Condensed snippets of accumulated wisdom, focusing
mostly on software and business, that I am fairly confident of and feel
compelled to share with you".

Many of these nuggets are not "obvious", for any conventional understanding of
that word.

That said, I enjoyed the post, and liked the concise format.

~~~
gizmo
"obvious" is not a property of a statement itself, it indicates a relationship
between a piece of knowledge and a larger knowledge base, where one thing
immediately follows from other things that are already known.

I don't think "obvious" in the conventional sense is a real category, because
no two people would agree the same things are obvious.

~~~
dwaltrip
Ah, just like the good old "it is trivial to see that a -> b" from advanced
mathematics.

------
legitster
This one had me stop

>The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses
average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same
form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years
rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.

I agree that it compresses the experience spectrum, but has the opposite
effect on wages. It's tough to find any industry that pays more for the amount
of experience/education.

~~~
ryandrake
Tech does not pay for experience.

A new grad's compensation is often equal and some times greater than someone
who's been in the trenches for 20 years. I don't know any other profession
with this absurd inversion. And with a few notable exceptions, the idea that
someone with 5 years of experience is Senior-anything is ridiculous. I
remember myself at 5 years out, I didn't know shit compared to today. Yet,
adjusted for location-cost of living and inflation, I'm making today about
what I made back then. The compensation plateau is very real, I assure you.
You'll probably find out in 20 years or so.

EDIT: There also wouldn't be so much persistent discussion about ageism in
tech either, if experience was valued/compensated.

~~~
legitster
I've definitely been part of a hiring process where "over-experienced" gets
thrown around a lot. Here's stuff that comes up all the time:

\- The main and _probably unfair_ assumption that they will want more money
and special treatment for the same amount of grunt work.

\- They will not respect the (majority 20-something) peers and will try to
subtly enforce seniority (again, unfair).

\- They will refuse to do grunt work and only want to work on high level
problems. We have enough chefs, we need line cooks.

\- Veterans can come well-seasoned, but they can also be old cranks who are
stuck in their ways and can drag a team backwards. It takes experience to tell
the difference (irony).

\- If they were _truly_ experienced, they would be getting poached or going
through a headhunter. If they are experienced and on the market, they must be
damaged good. (This one is truly unfair, but it justifies people relying on
paying the premium for a recruiter).

~~~
Terr_
> If they were truly experienced, they would be getting poached or going
> through a headhunter.

Huh, is that very common?

As someone with 10 years of experience but very little job-hopping (perhaps to
my detriment) I always had this feeling that recruiters were a bit like dodgy
car salesman, and that a direct application would be better.

~~~
heurist
Good recruiters are excellent networkers who are in touch with the most
exciting businesses in your area and field of expertise. I've only met one but
if I ever find myself looking for a job then I'll be talking with him.

~~~
Terr_
What I meant is whether there is really that much of a bias against
experienced direct applicants.

------
ThomPete
"Your idea is not valuable, at all."

If execution is all that matters your idea isn't good enough.

I don't care how many times people keep claiming that execution is all that
matters, it's still wrong or it becomes tautological, like saying. The key to
success is being successful.

Good ideas are often shitty ideas until they are good. What makes them good
isn't just execution but timing, luck and so many other factors.

Failing to understand that is a bigger problem than the few people left who
think the idea is everything.

~~~
Joeri
I always understood it to mean that a good idea doesn’t sell unless you
execute well on it, and also that an idea doesn’t need to be unique, it just
needs to be executed better than the competitors.

~~~
ThomPete
But that is also not always the case. If you are first to market you don't
need to be executing better than the competitors since they don't necessarily
exist.

It's way more complex and subtle than the "execution is all that matters" or
the "my idea is secured in a password protected powerpoint" camp.

I have helped over a 100 startups and at least in my experience, it's not more
correct to say execution is all that matters than to say ideas are all that
matter.

Plenty of well-executed ideas don't ever go anywhere because the ideas were
wrong, to begin with.

In the context of this otherwise fine list by Patrick this is just
particularly problematic because it's wrong in a non-obvious way but sounds
right.

~~~
solatic
> Plenty of well-executed ideas don't ever go anywhere because the ideas were
> wrong, to begin with.

Or, to put it another way, the founders made an MVP from their initial (for
argument's sake, poor) idea, and then couldn't find product-market fit before
running out of (bootstrapped or VC-funded) runway. Your argument, then, is
that some ideas and MVPs make it impossible to find product-market fit, no
matter who the founders / executive team are, because there is no market or
whatever other reason beyond the startup's control.

And you would be correct if it wasn't possible for startups to pivot. But they
do, sometimes multiple times, and sometimes successfully. Part of the reason
why execution is everything is because good executives can take what the
startup has learned about its product and its market, understand that the
startup's current trajectory leads to bankruptcy, and make the necessary pivot
which presents better odds at viability.

~~~
ThomPete
Startups pivoting is because their original idea didn't go anywhere. Plenty of
startups pivot and never get anywhere.

Again this obsessions witch claiming execution as somehow being in opposition
to idea is what's wrong here.

Both are important.

------
delhanty
>Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think
you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk
about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this
will mark you as clueless.

John Carmack is unusually direct and asserts pretty much the same things a
couple of weeks back. [1]

>This will never, ever work. Nobody will build your game idea and give you
money for it. If you go through the development process, you will find that
the original idea is a very small fraction of the value.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/931653803199275008](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/931653803199275008)

Edit: typo s/in/is

~~~
timthelion
I agree and disagree with this one. Of course, no one is going to pay money
for your game idea, but there _are_ ideas which require an NDA. Those ideas
typically take years of development and a person with such an idea would be
able to present hundreds of pages of alternate designs and their pros/cons.
For example, if I have a design for a 3mm x 1mm mechanism that can actuate a
rod by 2mm and I know what kind of power consumption said mechanism will have,
that design might be expressible on a single piece of paper, and be worth
millions of dollars.

~~~
delhanty
>a person with such an idea would be able to present hundreds of pages of
alternate designs

Arguably, that's _much_ more than just an idea - it's the idea plus the
development of the idea, with most of the value being in the development bit.

~~~
timthelion
True, but if I know that you have been working on the idea for 5 years, and
that you have those hundreds of pages of alternate designs, then even just the
end result may be valuable enough to me that you would want an NDA.

~~~
spencerflem
I think the quote is talking about the original idea before work has been put
into it, not an end product

~~~
timthelion
But a sketch isn't an end product. It is not a "realization".

------
jpm_sd
>Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-
working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances.
This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably
proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

I'm not sure if he's saying these hard-working generalists are hard to find,
or undesirable to employ?

~~~
throwawayjava
I'm also confused. What's a "mod _a_ l employee"?

~~~
duderific
I believe it's a typo, should be "model" employee.

~~~
maxerickson
No, it's referring to the statistical mode, the most frequent occurrence in a
set, "typical" would be a reasonable synonym there.

It's a roundaboot way of saying those qualities rarely all come together.

------
Joeri
_If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50%
of people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially
plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for
learning more about this is FizzBuzz._

So true, and something that stumped me when I sat at the other side of a
hiring table myself. I couldn't figure out why until it was pointed out to me
that people who are good at their job are not looking for work, they already
have a job. In fact, the really good people often don't apply for jobs at all,
but instead they get convinced to switch employers. By contrast, the people
who can't program are on the job market all the time. So, the job market is
heavily skewed towards people not good enough to hire.

~~~
FLUX-YOU
>By contrast, the people who can't program are on the job market all the time.
So, the job market is heavily skewed towards people not good enough to hire.

People should be allowed to leave the industry for some amount of time without
being marked as damaged goods.

In fact, based on how poorly technical interviews have evolved, I have no
faith that a hiring manager _wouldn 't_ just blindly ignore all candidates
with an employment gap on their record after reading posts similar to yours,
and that really is a damn shame. It's not a humane practice.

~~~
Joeri
I didn’t mean to imply employment gaps, just that people who can’t program do
a lot more job interviews than people who can.

------
md224
> Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

This might sound stupid, and maybe it's my inner hippie talking, but did this
make anyone else slightly uncomfortable? I get that it's "good business", but
something feels kinda gross about saying "extract as much money from other
people as you possibly can." Like... shouldn't you just charge whatever you
think something (a product, your time) is worth? I realize that "what
something is worth" is often subjective, but charging more just because you
can feels morally ambiguous to me at best.

(Then again, if you're talking about extracting money from a corporation, that
feels less gross. But of course my inner hippie would say that.)

~~~
mikeokner
The problem (other than your inner hippie :P) is that it can be quite
difficult to accurately value a software product. Most physical goods are
valued based on the cost of materials/manufacturing. However software is an
intangible good without those fixed costs. The closest thing is hosting.

For B2B solutions, value is more tied to how much it would cost a customer to
implement your solution instead of buying yours. But even a startup founder
who's been an engineer for many years might not have a clear picture of how
much the previous projects they worked on cost their employer. They only see
their own hourly rate or salary (which already might be low) and don't see the
total cost of development, the cost of infrastructure, personnel for ongoing
support, etc. Engineers notoriously under-price startup offerings because they
lack the broader perspective to accurately value their creations.

~~~
greggman
mini aside but products are never based on the price of materials as if you
follow the chain all materials start as free. They are all priced starting at
what people are willing to pay for the labor to take/prepare/transport the
free materials. maybe that helps see that enginering is no different

~~~
mikeokner
I get where you're coming from, but my point was mostly that when a business
develops a product, upfront engineering is often seen as somewhat of a sunk
cost. The more important measure is the margin on the physical product. The
cost of raw materials (and shipping, manufacturing, etc) is far easier to
quantify.

------
otakucode
I don't believe companies want "hard-working generalists who operate
autonomously and have high risk tolerances." I mean obviously, yes, they would
claim to want that, but that sort of employee is fundamentally incompatible
with modern business. Modern business is predicated upon the idea of employees
being as replaceable and interchangeable as possible. It is a common idea
presented in many management books that if an employee becomes important to
the company, they should be fired immediately. The thinking is that if your
company grows in reliance upon this person, they might one day ask for more
money and when you fire them at that point the damage done will be worse so it
is better to nip the problem in the bud and bite the bullet and get rid of
them when you notice their importance and deal with the smaller amount of
disruption. Any hard-working generalist who operates autonomously will, by
necessity, be building systems which they have all of the domain knowledge
about. And despite companies wishing to believe domain knowledge is not
valuable, it has substantial operational and financial impact when lost.

>The hardest problem in B2C is distribution.

This confuses me. Distribution is trivially solved. Anyone can get a product
to a customer for quite low cost anywhere in the world now. Is something else
meant by "distribution" aside from 'getting things from point A to point B'?
If I had a warehouse in my back yard and a customer wanting a product from it,
I could ship it to the customer just as easily as Amazon could. Their
advantage isn't in being able to distribute things. It's in aggregation and
many other different things but not distribution. Distribution was the most
valuable economic activity of the past century, but it's commoditized now.

>Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the
public markets

The efficient market hypothesis says that profit is an error, an inefficiency
which will rapidly go to zero as it will be stripped by underpriced
competitors. This is not a good heuristic.

~~~
brucephillips
> The efficient market hypothesis says that profit is an error

No it doesn't. It's a pricing hypothesis. It says nothing about the presence
or absence of profits.

------
Kluny
> Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

I find this advice unhelpful. In the past, when I was making $23/hour as a web
developer, people would occasionally ask to hire me for freelance work. I've
given various answers, from $30 to $100, and haven't had any takers yet. The
only freelance work I've actually done so far was when I said, "what do you
think it's worth?" and my friend said, "I dunno, 60?" It was for about an hour
of work so I said yeah, but I had already done the work by that point anyway.

$100/hour seems like the right amount to me, since my company was billing me
out at $116. But no one else thinks so. I'm pretty sure there's more to it
than just "charge more".

~~~
ccmonnett
I think this piece of advice is extremely relevant for those selling B2B
software/products which comes in bigger 'chunks' than your labor which can be
sold by the hour.

The gist is that while you (as the average B2B startup) can estimate how
valuable your product is to your average customer, you will most likely vastly
underestimate the cost of replacement for such a system. In other words, if
your sales pitch goes well and they like the product but think to themselves
"How much would it cost us to build this ourselves?" you will underestimate
this cost from the outside. This is because the cost of replacement is a
reasonably good proxy for a price ceiling and by being aware of it you can get
a much higher average selling price.

------
bonestamp2
I like this format/premise a lot... it allows you the freedom to say things
you find insightful without the risk of some know-it-all coming along and
telling you it's obvious. We should do more of this -- nearly everything is
going to seem obvious to someone else, but those people should just keep their
mouth closed and keep looking for something they didn't know.

------
gajomi
>The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you

I really like this one. During my biology days, there was a fellow PhD student
in the lab who had spent 15+ years in corporate IT before joining academia,
and he always had great stories of the incredible amounts of cash we should
expect to see flow around us should we embark on careers outside of academia
(he was not wrong).

------
tptacek
Especially after reading the comments on this thread, I'm really not sure HN
is a good venue for discussing tweet streams. I think if Patrick wanted to
write something that would spark a discussion on HN, he'd have written a blog
post.

~~~
jstanley
I for one had no idea this was not a blog post.

~~~
OrwellianChild
Can we change the link to this:
[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936615043126370306](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/936615043126370306)

(so folks understand this is a tweetstorm and not a post?)

~~~
jstanley
I actually think this interface is a better way to read a tweetstorm, it could
just do with prefixing the title with "A tweetstorm by patio11" to remove the
confusion.

------
chx
> There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing,
> anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at
> AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious
> imperfection that it presents with.

This is painfully true. I so often hoped someone will explain some Linux stuff
to me but... strace it is :)

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
I think the main point of the quote is that nobody knows everything. There are
pockets of knowledge, and there are specialists who know quite a bit about
Linux. ;) You just need to find that person and not expect them to also know
about something completely different like Windows or Asian-Pacific
geopolitics.

------
peterwwillis
> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time
> employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit
> or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more
> than they charitably file taxes.

There are perhaps 1000 OSS projects that make up the software you use on a
daily basis. Many of these have core developers or maintainers who are hired
by a company to write or maintain that software for them to consume.

But there are literally millions more open source projects, almost entirely
developed by hobbyists.

Github alone has 24 million developers, with 67 million repos (25 million of
which are public), and 1.5 million organizations, in 200 countries. The top
languages used there are JS, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, C++, CSS, C#, Go, and C.
(Github, btw, is not the only repository of open source code)

Most open source software is most definitely not written by one kind of dev.
But there _is_ an underlying motivator behind almost all open source: _" I
need this code."_ As long as there is someone who needs it passionately enough
to take it upon themselves to craft and produce it, without regard to
commercial gain, it will stay alive. Open Source is basically woodworking, and
our computers are the chisels and saws.

------
brucephillips
> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution.

This is wrong, and I'm surprised it's repeated so often. Some ideas are better
than others. If you doubt this, ask yourself if, when starting a company, you
would choose a random idea or your best idea.

Of course you would choose your best idea, which implies ideas have different
value.

EDIT: I'm happy to debate this point with anyone who would otherwise downvote
me. Critical replies welcome.

~~~
im2nguyen
I don't think it necessarily means "all ideas are the same". You're right --
some ideas may be better than others, but until they're executed successfully,
they're just ideas.

ie: There were multiple ways that Google could have executed their goal of
building a search engine (engineering, sales, etc). Even if you come up with a
'better' idea, it may not be successful/valuable if you execute it poorly and
make the wrong decisions.

~~~
brucephillips
Except google's idea wasn't "search engine". Google's idea was "search engine
that uses the PageRank algorithm". PageRank did not encompass all of the value
of Google, but it did encompass much of it, and it was unequivocally part of
the idea.

What you're effectively saying is that ideas have no value _without_ good
execution, which is of course true, but this is very different than saying
they have no value, because after all, execution has no value without a good
idea.

~~~
im2nguyen
If the value is in "search engine that uses the PageRank algorithm", then
theoretically you can take that idea and execute it to get the same value.

The difference isn't in the idea but the execution - hence the value.

~~~
brucephillips
I'm sorry, I don't follow.

EDIT: Oh I see what you mean now. By "you", you actually mean me. No, I
couldn't, because Google has parlayed their initial good idea into a monopoly
based on network effects, specifically the accrual of proprietary data
(clicks) which I have no access to.

The idea was valuable in 1997. It's no longer.

~~~
im2nguyen
If the value is in the idea, then multiple execution of the same idea should
result in the same/similar values. But... this isn't true irl, therefore the
differences in value isn't in the idea but the execution

~~~
brucephillips
Your error is in concluding that because execution matters, ideas don't
matter. But that's erroneous. Both matter.

------
chubot
_The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is
sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have
mortal locks on distribution._

I agree with this, but I think it's interesting. Wasn't the Internet supposed
to democratize distribution? All someone has to do is go to your website. And
anybody can set up a website.

So it seems like the Internet just shifted the goal posts for everyone? The
winners are still as dominant as ever.

But I guess it is true that you can have a break-out hit like Instagram or
WhatsApp, and that wasn't possible pre-Internet. The time scales are
compressed.

But perversely, maybe because distribution is easier and software flows more
freely, you have to be even better? You can't rely on "local inefficiencies"?
You have to be globally the best.

~~~
brucephillips
> AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have mortal
> locks on distribution.

Well, first of all, this isn't true. Google and FB aren't so profitable
because of a distribution monopoly. They're profitable due to network effects.

~~~
mrep
network effects: a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional
value as more people use it.

How does google search get better from more people using it?

~~~
chubot
To be brief, more data (generated by clicks and queries) leads to better
ranking. Better ranking attracts more users. Starting a search engine from
scratch without any user data is a big disadvantage.

Basically, you're benefitting from other people who are searching for the same
thing as you on the same search engine. (I'm sure that's not the only network
effect, but it's one of them.)

------
gthtjtkt
> The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires,
> and retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit
> in a tweet, but, a good thing to know.

Would love to read more about that. I'd be willing to bet most SMBs are
terrible at hiring / retaining developers.

My last company did literally nothing to help devs learn and grow (or to
reward those who did so on their own), which created a department full of
miserable, unmotivated people. The only reason most of them are still there is
because they haven't found a new job but can't afford to leave.

They're trapped, essentially.

------
stirner
I expected this to be an article about general life tips. Perhaps the title
could use the suffix “About Startups”?

~~~
quadrangle
I think it's about software / programming world and economics, not just
startups. Still very niche, not stuff about life relevant to any non-tech
person

------
justonepost
"Your idea is not valuable" ... no, maybe not some top level idea like "Social
media, but more private." But, execution is just a bunch of smaller ideas.

~~~
mitchdoogle
It's not just about ideas. Coming up with ideas is easy. Turning an idea into
a viable product involves a lot of work.

~~~
Bromskloss
> Coming up with ideas is easy.

I think that depends on how stringent criteria you put on the ideas. An idea
that maybe, with a lot of work, would be successful might be easy to come up
with. An idea that is very likely to succeed, with little work and no
investments, might not be that easy to find.

------
swamp40
_> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution._

Then why did Amazon patent the concept of a drone that will fly to your car
and recharge it?

~~~
psyc
Because patents are valuable. Specifically, blocking others from executing.

~~~
brucephillips
Patents first require an idea to be patented, so if patents are valuable,
ideas are valuable.

------
jondubois
I agree with most points except this one:

>> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time
employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or
implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than
they charitably file taxes.

Most open source projects don't go anywhere... They have about 3 stars on
Github and nobody uses them.

To say that open source is not charity work is quite unfair. The number of
people who make money from their open source projects is tiny... Even among
popular projects with thousands of stars. The real motivation behind most open
source projects is a strong desire to learn and explore new ideas and to share
these ideas with others.

The financial stuff might come later but most of the time it doesn't come at
all.

Outside of the cryptocurrency space and big corporations, very few people who
get into open source do so because they think it is a good way to make
money... Because it's not.

I believe very strongly that most open source projects are founded on
altruism. The motivation might change over time but you cannot disregard the
initial intent.

~~~
astura
You're making the mistake of assuming open source means "something you that's
not your job."

This is false.

Most open source development is _paid work_. Many people "get into open
source" by accepting a regular day job.

[https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-
devel...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/for-50-percent-of-developers-
open-source-is-a-9-to-5-job/)

~~~
jondubois
I've done open source work for 10 years. I'm pretty sure I know what open
source means.

You can have a look at GitHub; there are 25 million active repos on there; at
least 99% of them are not sponsored by any company and nobody gets paid to
work on them.

People like the OP and yourself are spreading distorted ideas which harm open
source and the software ecosystem as a whole.

Putting open source projects on the same level as commercial software is not
right. They are often completely different kinds of people behind them.

~~~
benji-york
You're probably mostly right, but note that there is a bit of a "dark matter"
issue here. A lot of open source work is done at the behest of an employer and
on the clock but still appears to be a "personal" project.

I have worked on many open source projects that would appear to be entirely
the work of individuals, when they are in fact working on company time.

------
brucephillips
BTW, doesn't this app break Twitter's ToS by displaying tweets in a non-
standard format? [https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-
req...](https://developer.twitter.com/en/developer-terms/display-requirements)

------
rytill
> Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that
> other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing
> it.

Can someone explain b) to me?

Is he saying that, assuming you fit into category a, by explicitly revealing
your knowledge, your potential opportunities will expand more than you
estimate?

~~~
sah2ed
Yes.

For instance, if you _consistently_ put out good pieces on your past
experiences in the software industry as a PM, then your current experiences as
a software business owner, you will gradually become widely known as the guy
who gives advice about what you _shouldn 't_ be doing in your software career
or software business.

This was essentially how Joel Spolsky grew his audience through his blog --
turning his knowledge into published pieces. His blog audience combined with
Jeffrey Atwood's blog audience were instrumental to getting StackOverflow off
the ground.

You never know, but having an existing audience can be an incredible enabler
for getting your future ventures off the ground.

------
msla
I do not doubt this:

> Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time
> employed by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit
> or implicit blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more
> than they charitably file taxes.

But I wonder how many important Open Source projects were _started_ that way,
by employees of companies which wanted to use those projects. Linux, for
example, most certainly was _not_ begun that way.

~~~
chubot
Yes, I think this sentence oversimplifies things. The conclusions should be
divided between:

1) Most open source software written and released today

2) Most open source software you use

The code in category #2 is much older on average.

Most people here use bash every day, but as far as I can tell, there's about
one person behind it, who doesn't get paid for it (Chet Ramey).

And you're right that a lot of projects start free, and then get commercial
contribution once they are valuable. Linux, git, hg, and Python all fit that
profile.

In the "non-company" category, I would put Linux, git, hg, gcc, Apache. A lot
of people still use Apache. nginx was in this category too until very
recently.

SVN is interesting because it was started by a company (CollabNet), but I
believe they diverged and the company no longer had much economic interest in
it.

Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that the story is really complicated. It's
not as simple as what's in that Tweet.

~~~
msla
> And you're right that a lot of projects start free, and then get commercial
> contribution once they are valuable. Linux, git, hg, and Python all fit that
> profile.

I think you used the wrong word here, or at least a misleading one:

Linux, for example, is still free and Free for most reasonable definitions
people have of those terms. (Anti-copyleft trolling is not reasonable.) Its
development is _funded_ , yes, but that funding doesn't give IBM, for example,
special rights which a sufficiently determined individual hacker couldn't also
have: Both have the ability to have an idea, code it, and get the code
accepted, and IBM isn't immune to a Linus veto just because IBM's poured money
into their team of kernel contributors.

I rant, but it's an important distinction between Open Source and closed
source. It also reminds me of an old joke: Back in the 1990s, Apple, bereft of
Jobs and nearly dead against Microsoft, was moving towards IBM in terms of
strategic partnerships. So, the joke went "Apple + IBM = IBM", as in, if you
move too close to IBM, IBM engulfs you and you lose your identity. My point
is, IBM can't engulf an Open Source project unless absolutely nobody outside
IBM cares about it and all the repos outside of IBM's purview utterly
stagnate.

> In the "non-company" category, I would put Linux, git, hg, gcc, Apache. A
> lot of people still use Apache. nginx was in this category too until very
> recently.

I don't know if you noticed, but you put Linux in two different categories.

> SVN is interesting because it was started by a company (CollabNet), but I
> believe they diverged and the company no longer had much economic interest
> in it.

That is interesting.

> It's not as simple as what's in that Tweet.

Things rarely are. :)

Good post!

~~~
chubot
Yes, there are a lot of dimensions, hence Linux falling in multiple
categories. It was started by an individual, but many of the current
contributions are by people who are paid to work on it.

The story isn't simple for any big/successful project I can think of:

1) Started by a company for profit, vs. an individual for fun, or maybe
profit.

2) Where the current commits come from, regardless of how the project started
(contributor is paid or not paid)

I didn't mean to suggest that "free" and "commercial contribution" are
mutually exclusive. The distinction I meant is whether the contributor is part
of an organization that makes money from the software.

3) Whether the project was forked. WebKit was forked, LLVM was shepherded by
Apple into a huge project, but Apple didn't start it. CyanogenMod was forked
the other way (from a company to a commercial effort), and then turned back
into a different company.

Additionally, some people might start a company to make open source software.
And some employees might be paid more making proprietary software, but choose
to work somewhere where they can work on open source.

So yes it's very complicated. This quote:

 _It is not charity work, any more than they charitably file taxes._

isn't useful, except for the very small number of people who think that "open
source == free == no profit".

------
brutus1213
Not sure I agree with these two:

"Salaries in the tech industry are up _a lot_ in the last few years, caused
by: a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests
of workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like.

Investor money _does not_ pay most salaries."

But the rest are pretty sage. As one would expect of patio11 :)

------
purplezooey
"collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of workers" \-- to what
is this referring?

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Agreements not to negotiate past a certain amount and not compete too hard for
talent, etc. amongst tech companies to reduce wages. Link:

[https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-
wage...](https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-fixing-
cartel-involved-dozens-more-companies-over-one-million-employees/)

------
Singletoned
> Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the
> Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's
> the ambient level of literacy.

I didn't understand this one (perhaps due to not being American). Can someone
explain it please?

~~~
oconnor663
Thanksgiving is a holiday where many people have a big family meal. If you
have family members who you usually only see once a year, there's a good
chance that day is Thanksgiving. So that's when a lot of people tend to field
questions from people who 1) care about them enough to ask how their new job
is going but 2) have no idea what they really do at work.

~~~
aap_
I thought they meant that they would ask you to fix their computer.

------
lifeisstillgood
"""in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many places and markedly
decreasing the total cost of people required to implement it."""

thus a big idea search should be on what are common processes. "reading
english" seems to be the next big one

------
nickthemagicman
Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think
you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk
about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this
will mark you as clueless.

Love that so much.

------
wtvanhest
Whatever this app is, it would be really helpful to not do the jagged edge
thing on the top as it makes it completely unreadable for me. I use the top of
windows to line up text and without that ability, I basically cannot read the
words.

------
charlieflowers
> This is not the modal employee,

Is this a misuse of the word "modal"? If not, could someone please explain
this definition to me? From context, I'm guessing the author means "typical"
perhaps?

~~~
ktta
He does mean typical, but I'm not sure if the definition is correct. Mode of a
sequence is the unit occurring most number of times. So the modal employee is
supposed to be the most frequently occurring one.

------
ElijahLynn
I thought this was going to be a list about "life". I was actually pleasantly
surprised it was about our industry!

I would still like there to be a list like this about life though.

~~~
notdonspaulding
I'll have a go. Here's a few that seem almost axiomatic to me but that I think
might be somewhat less so to this crowd:

\- Words are important. Choose them carefully. Hear them carefully.

\- "Tolerating everyone but the intolerant" is no real tolerance at all.

\- Only being "free" to hold your views in private, is no real freedom at all.
Freedoms of speech and association and religion _must be public freedoms_ if
they are to be meaningful in any real sense.

\- There's a continuum that exists between equality and freedom. Governments
and society can more-or-less choose where they sit on the continuum, but can't
move more towards one value without trading off some of the other.

\- Prices agreed to by individuals in a free market (read: without coercion)
are a statement each individual is making about the value of the good or
service being traded. What's a "fair wage" for mowing lawns? What's a "fair
price" for a watermelon? How much is "too much" profit for a legal firm?
Capitalism is nothing more than a recognition that built into humanity is a
_desire to trade_ what you have for what you want, and a declaration that the
Free Market is the most economical (read: efficient) way for humans to fulfill
that desire. Following on from the previous axiom, you can certainly declare a
"fair price for watermelon", but you're removing the freedom of individuals to
decide for themselves how they value the world around them.

\- Be highly skeptical of anyone handing out pitchforks. And learn to
recognize when you're being handed one in a news article, youtube video,
reddit comment, political ad, etc., etc.

\- When you feel like the world is full of people who aren't changing their
values fast enough, remember Chesterton's Fence[0]. In the main, the world
around you exists the way it does for a reason (or for a plethora of reasons),
and if you don't understand that reason, you're less likely to understand what
the right fix is.

\- Debt (of all kinds: student, mortgage, business) is a promise you're making
about your future. The older, more formal term for a loan is a "promissory
note".

\- Before you make any promise, consider your ability to predict and control
the future.

\- Constraints are natural pressures, disadvantages, and discomforts that can
be helpful in decision-making. Don't avoid painful situations.

(I think those last three make a powerful argument for bootstrapping startups
instead of chasing VC funding or debt.)

\- We will always have "bad" laws. There is no one set of guidelines which
humanity will ever discover that will cleanly cover all use cases and will be
agreed upon as being right by everyone.

\- Humans are moral creatures. Whenever anyone uses the word " _should_ " or "
_ought_ " in a sentence, they're making a moral statement. Hawking may be a
world leading physicist, but when he declared philosophy to be dead, there's a
reason philosopher's all around the world shot milk out their noses[1].

\- You can't legislate morality. But in a democracy, legislation is the
lowest-common-denominator of the morality of the governed. This means that
just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's moral. It also means that
in a society which encourages diversity of values, you'll have less common
ground upon which to legislate.

\- Don't act surprised when someone is ignorant of a fact or subject which you
know. Help them understand it with humility.

\- Don't hesitate to disclose your ignorance of a subject to someone who can
help you learn more about it. They may not want to point out your ignorance,
and silently pretending you do understand it only keeps you from learning new
things.

\- Corporations are people. Or more precisely, its impossible to separate out
the corporate entity's values and behavior from its owners' values and
behavior.

\- As much as possible, have your mind made up how you will handle pressure to
compromise on your values before you're in a tenuous situation.

\- Don't worry about "missing out". FOMO is terrible justification for doing
things you wouldn't otherwise do. Though this isn't an argument against
spontaneity.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton.27s_fence)

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/How-are-philosophers-reacting-to-
Steph...](https://www.quora.com/How-are-philosophers-reacting-to-Stephen-
Hawkings-proclamation-that-philosophy-is-dead)

------
dllthomas
> Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the
> Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's
> the ambient level of literacy.

At my Thanksgiving table there's two professional programmers, a CS student,
and a CS professor. While I'm doubtless an extreme example, my general point
is that "your Thanksgiving table" is still a bubble. That said, sure, for many
it will be _closer_ to representative than friends/coworkers.

------
westoncb
Anyone want to take a crack at expanding this?:

> The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires,
> and retains candidates.

~~~
curtis
Given the amount of money and resources that goes into recruiting and hiring,
I find it hard to believe that the industry is not serious.

On the other hand, the current approaches clearly don't work very well, and
everybody knows it, but nobody seems to be interested in seriously thinking
about what we need to do differently. (patio11 and tptacek are notable
exceptions)

~~~
wyclif
Aline Lerner is interested:
[http://blog.alinelerner.com/](http://blog.alinelerner.com/)

~~~
stevenwoo
So her best predictor of future job performance is number of typos on resume.
That is my pet peeve when looking at resumes, but it really discriminates
against people for whom English is not their native language. On the other
hand, didn't have a lot of non native English speakers applying to the
positions for which I was hiring back then.

------
ChuckMcM
I like the notions of specialists and generalists. Generalists tend to under-
estimate specialists and vice-versa.

------
bdcs
Can anyone expound on "collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of
workers"?

~~~
bdcs
Aha! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

------
megamindbrian2
This is helpful for my Asperger's. I like the part about the coffee money.
Thank you!

------
InclinedPlane
Generally good stuff, some quibbles:

> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution.

Good advice in the main but not 100% accurate. Some ideas are novel and good.
In fact, many are. But communicating even good ideas is _difficult_ bordering
on impossible, more so for truly novel and innovative ideas. Think about how
often an adaptation of an excellent novel translates into an excellent movie.
It's rare. But that doesn't mean that novels (or idea) are worthless. It means
that execution is hard, it means that communicating ideas is hard. Even if you
can spend years turning an excellent idea into a fully fleshed out idea (a
novel) it will still be hard to execute it faithfully. And by the same token,
most books are pretty mediocre, for example, just as most ideas are mediocre.
Trite, repetitive, hackneyed, etc. That doesn't mean all ideas are valueless,
just most of them, and it can be difficult to figure that out until you've
gotten to execution.

> There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing,
> anywhere.

This is also mostly true but a bit misleading. It's nice to think that
everyone is just struggling along half-assing things the same way you are, and
that's true. Mostly. But there are actually a _lot_ of people who really do
have their shit together, really do know what they're doing, and are just
_better_ at their jobs by a significant margin than most people. It's
comforting to think that such people are an illusion, but they are out there,
sometimes they aren't even doing glamorous work. The fact that they exist
isn't really terribly important (if you're really lucky you might be able to
hire them, but you probably won't be that lucky).

What's more important, I think, is that there is no excuse not to try to do
better, constantly. If you want to really have a competitive advantage don't
worry about hiring the top 1%, rockstars, ninjas, or even necessarily the
"10x" workers. Concentrate on fostering a culture of continuous improvement
and collaboration. Learn about best practices. Apply them. Build policies,
processes, and culture that support doing better. Study what works and what
doesn't push towards an environment that fosters doing what works and abandons
bad practices. Stop firefighting start doing root cause analysis. Do code
reviews regularly, get better at it. Test your code, increase automated
testing, increase the quality of testing. Keep moving the bar higher in terms
of quality. Figure out how to accelerate development velocity. Move error
detection closer to the point of checkin. Never give up raising the bar.
Decent developers working as a team with a good process focused on continuous
improvement will out-perform rockstars stomping on each other's toes all the
time every day of the week, by orders of magnitude.

------
garfieldnate
What is the anti-labor cartel he's talking about?

~~~
greenyoda
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

------
philipov
Which cartel is he referring to?

~~~
monktastic1
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

[https://pando.com/2014/03/30/court-docs-google-hiked-
wages-t...](https://pando.com/2014/03/30/court-docs-google-hiked-wages-to-
combat-hot-young-facebook-after-sheryl-sandberg-refused-to-join-hiring-
cartel/)

------
hoodoof
> Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution.

Simply not true. Ask the Winklevoss twins.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
That's a near-perfect example of his point.

~~~
deanjones
You are aware, I assume, that the Winklevoss twins were awarded $65 million
for "their" idea?

------
macintux
Typos are distracting. I don't know whether "modal" programmers is intentional
or a typo for "model".

~~~
saryant
Pretty sure he means "modal" as in mode average.

~~~
macintux
Entirely possible, and I thought so too, but then I bumped into a typo later
which made me question it. Dunno.

------
bambax
> _Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution._

This is oft repeated, but not always true. Take the Nazis (bear with me).

The Nazis had the best execution _ever_. They almost drowned the whole British
army, which had previously conquered the world. While fighting battles all
over Europe and being one of the most bombarded country in history, they
continued to produce tanks, planes, submarines, operate a bureaucracy until
the very end, invent bombs and other systems that befuddled all other nations.

Yet they lost the war. The reason they lost the war is, their _idea_ was so
bad, people everywhere were willing to die to make it fail.

An excellent idea can survive a bad execution for some time. A terrible idea
will ultimately fail, no matter the execution.

~~~
valuearb
Terrible analogy. Nazi execution was horrible post invasion of France.
Hitler's conservative generals hadn't foreseen how effective their blitzkrieg
tactics were at the beginning of the war. That justified his own delusional
view of his own greatness and Nazi superiority, even though he & the Nazi's
had nothing to do with the success, it came from german armies brilliant
strategies/tactics/training/soldiers and preparation.

So then Hitler stopped listening to his generals, and went on to micromanage
the war, and made one terrible decision after another.

• Not invading Britain before starting a war with the USSR, where Germany was
outnumbered by over 3-1.

• Focusing the Russian invasion n Moscow instead of the far more important
strategic objective of Kursk's oil fields. Not only did Germany needed more
oil, but Kursk was also nearly the USSR's only supply. They got close to
Kursk, but didn't destroy tthe oil fields when they fell short, and Germany's
war efforts was handicapped by oil shortages the rest of the war. Your air
force can't use it's superiority if it can't leave the ground, and neither can
your tank commanders if their tanks can't start.

• Sending a million man army to attack Stalingrad when it had little strategic
value, then abandoned it, losing every single man. When you are outnumbered
3-1, you can't fight wars of attrition, every man counts.

• Rejected the Army's plan to liberate Ukrainians and recruit them to fight as
allies against the USSR. This would have almost evened the man-power
disadvantage with a fresh supply of soldiers who hated the USSR. Instead he
declared them sub-human, ordering them liquidated to make "living space" for
Germany, and turned Ukrainian resistance behind German lines into a
devastatingly powerful asset of the USSR.

• Ordered the ME-262, by far the worlds fastest fighter, to be launched with
bomb mounts that slowed it substantially so it could only be used as fighter
bomber, while Germany was being bombed relentlessly and had lost command of
it's own skies.

• Wasting huge amounts of resources on wonder-weapons such as the V1, V2, that
had almost no impact on the Allies war efforts.

• Also includes the Maus and Tiger Tanks, which sucked resources away from
building more of their best tank, the Panther.

~~~
bambax
Most of these examples are strategic mistakes, not execution. Execution means,
the ability to do what you set out to do.

Not focusing on the right objective is not, IMHO, an execution problem. It's a
vision problem, a leadership failure.

~~~
valuearb
Hitler personally controlling movement of units on the eastern front, causing
massive traffic jams and misallocations of fuel was clearly an execution
issue.

But much of what I wrote above was also an execution issue. Making oil fields
a number one priority was an obviously correct decision for the army generals.
Not being allowed to do it because of diverted resources was an execution
issue.

------
throwawayjava
_> Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years
include putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the
world's population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university
money."_

Oh, I didn't realize tech invented the library card.

~~~
jerf
As cool as libraries are, and they are cool, if you value your time at even
minimum wage rates, they are not "coffee money". That's why you... yes, you,
even you... whip out your phone to answer questions that you would never dream
of running to the library to answer on the spot. This is a real effect, not an
illusion. Friction matters, a lot.

~~~
throwawayjava
Again, all these things people are saying are indeed true, but they also make
the university comparison in the original quote something of a red herring.

~~~
jerf
I'm not sure you, or any other of the other commenters in this thread, quite
understand what was meant by "university money". "University money" is what it
costs to buy scientific journals; in theory anybody can do it, in practice
only Universities have both the need and the funding to do it. It isn't that
your phone is a university... it is that it has all this information
accessible for so dirt cheap that African farmers can get at it, modulo the
language barrier.

~~~
throwawayjava
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.

