
Everyone is totally just winging it, all the time (2014) - mastax
https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/may/21/everyone-is-totally-just-winging-it
======
davnicwil
I'm always really impressed by young people, early in their careers or without
any career experience at all, who intuit this and are confident in their
convictions and get stuff done despite their inexperience.

When I was young I was _convinced_ that life beyond academia in all fields
would be this super serious, mega competitive space where most everyone has
everything figured out. That everyone who was there, in any kind of
profession, would be super smart and really know their game inside out.

When I started my career I assumed frankly that my opinions were wrong,
because of this. In my first job there were a lot of aspects that were almost
the parody of how not to do things, yet even though I sensed this intuitively
I convinced myself probably for the first year that I must be wrong and this
must just be the way things are done in industry. That I would eventually
figure out that this was the right way to do things. It's quite funny to look
back on that in retrospect.

What I find most impressive about tales of young company builders and leaders,
the classic Gates/Jobs/Zuckerberg etc, is not actually what they did but that
they had the sheer temerity to do it at that age without first building their
confidence in industry for a few years.

How did they know that they had the ability to build companies such as theirs
-- surely were it possible one of the adults with 10-20 years industry
experience would have figured it out already? How did they have the confidence
to hold their own when confronted with such adults (many of whom I'm sure
challenged them and competed with them for influence) as their companies grew?
Truly awe inspiring.

~~~
B0btheBuilder
Zuckerberg's mom's a psychiatrist and his dad's a dentist. His dad taught him
BASIC programming as a kid and then hired a software engineer as his tutor.

Gates' dad's a prominent lawyer and his mom was a prominent businesswoman on
the board of directors on several different organizations. Not only did Gates
learn programming as a kid, but Microsoft only got on IBM computers because
his mom knew IBM executives.

When you come from privilege, it's much easier to have confidence that things
will work out.

~~~
expertentipp
We often forget that basically always brilliant successful kids have solid
fundaments in form of their parents, affluent in the financial and legal
domains. Even then they don't always succeed - remember that British kid who
sold a recommendation engine to Yahoo?

The rags-to-riches in the industry doesn't exist, move along people.

~~~
manmal
Yes, because poor (or not-well-off) people have this enormous respect of
money, and of people who have accumulated lots of it. They don’t want to waste
this investor‘s time, and they are scared of asking customers for money.

Well-off people don’t have these problems. That random investor is just like
their dad, plus or minus the Rolex, and they know their language („Have you
been to Martha’s this year?“). Asking for money is not a problem either
because they never experienced the process of spending money as painful -
their worldview is that you have a certain budget to spend, and when it’s gone
you either wait a bit or get some more.

~~~
expertentipp
It's about consequences as well. Someone not-affluent and not-well-connected
will not be able to wash off the liability for burning down millions.

------
Flozzin
This article reminds me of a clip from an interview with Obama recently.
[https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716](https://youtu.be/N7ZHDoNhScY?t=716)

He states that he expected people in charge would be more informed or smarter
as he progressed up the chain from community organizer to world leader. But in
his experience they did not. In his words, "It was all the same people."

Another person that touches on this idea is Adam Corolla. His often states his
observation that he thought everyone was good at their job when he was a
child. But when he grew up and worked with people he realized that there are
so many people that are bad at their jobs.

~~~
pmoriarty
I guess Obama never met people like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack.

~~~
empath75
I bet John Carmack is just winging it in a lot of aspects of his life, too.

~~~
Applejinx
Hearing Jonathan Blow talk about John Carmack is fascinating.

It's in some video or other, as it's a story Blow tells on himself when giving
talks. He'd gone over the Doom source code when Carmack had open-sourced it,
and Blow was appalled, because it was loaded with inefficient, crude, not-
optimized stuff. Essentially, Doom source code was dumb and primitive.

Jonathan Blow's initial reaction was horror and contempt, because the code
gave the impression that Carmack was just winging it most uncaringly. Later,
Blow decided that this was a process of value judgement, and himself turned
against trying to optimize and refine every little code style, in favor of
doing stuff that didn't take nearly as much brain and ability to retain state.
He took some of Carmack's dumbness and crudeness as an example of where to
place your attention.

This is totally valid, while at the same time being a conscious decision to
'just wing it' in many senses. I do this myself, even on public-facing code.
In a sense it's optimization and choosing to focus on areas where I can be
more useful. At the same time, I'm literally just winging it and some of the
things I'm not doing, I'm not doing because I'm too dumb to know how, and
would be distracted by trying to learn. If I had great mastery of all these
things it would affect my choices, but when I don't I'll take the Carmack path
and ostentatiously do the 'crude' thing so I can lean on what I do have going
for me.

~~~
derangedHorse
There's a concept I learned in an Ethics class years ago that basically
outlined a thought experiment where some thinkers had to decide the solution
to a problem with immediacy but because they were too busy thinking about
their decision, they were no longer able to decide. I feel like it describes
these types of scenarios perfectly.

------
drawkbox
Humans are a differentiation machine, they follow along known branches until
they break into something new. There they can create a new branch where they
might be first or one of a few new minds in that area, in that case, 'winging
it' may be employed but it is also based on experience in what to do with
unknowns.

With any production/consumer scenario it is usually 1 to 1000 or more ratio.
Most people aren't making new territory all the time, even inventors or
creators. The fact is most of human existence is observing, studying,
thinking, following, viewing existing knowledge while very few interact or
create new production or are producing at one time on one subject or
concentration, we are usually part of the 1000, though we all are the 1s for
something.

All of that preparation prepares you for the moment where you meet new ground
that must be entered and conquered. So new areas, even for the most
experienced, are essentially 'winging it' uncharted territory until it becomes
a solid branch of growth in the individual or industry/area of expertise. It
is a bit like practice, which is a series of sketches until the time you have
to use that skill in production where the refined lines, inking and color are
put together, the art of progression/innovation comes together for production.

Then comes the 'here we go' and 'let's do this' moment where even experienced
and skilled professionals take flight with the butterflies in their stomach of
nervousness and excitement to conquer unknowns in uncharted territory with
their pack of experience and knowledge, the experience/book smarts meet the
reality/street, the adventure begins.

------
e17a
N. N. Taleb has been harping away at this for ages now. Here are some great
quotes:

> Electricians, barbers, gardeners, surgeons, tango dancers, are experts. Not
> economists.

> The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the
> electrician, dentist, are experts, while the journalist, State Department
> bureaucrat, and macroeconomist are not. Since then, there has been a global
> movement against the pseudo-expert, the serial incompetence of a certain
> class of babbling and pompous operatives across bureaucrato-academic
> professions. Which leads to the question: who is the real expert? Who
> decides on who is and who is not expert? Where is the metaexpert? Time it
> is. Or, rather, Lindy.

------
pdonis
So the evidence this article is based on is...a Reddit thread? Excuse me?

 _Somebody_ is certainly winging it without knowing what they're doing.

~~~
jameslk
Yes I'm also confused by this article (opinion piece?) and the comments here
(also mostly opinions). I'm pretty sure I'm not just winging it when I do my
job. But I guess we don't really have a formal definition of "winging it" to
have a meaningful conversation about what that is exactly.

~~~
cafebabbe
Aha, but, to paraphrase the internet-favorite Dunning-Kruger effect, thinking
you're not winging it is the most severe way of winging it :)

~~~
jameslk
I know you're probably just kidding, but I'm going to be pedantic anyway and
link you to this: [http://danluu.com/dunning-
kruger/](http://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/)

~~~
cafebabbe
Yes, just joking, of course. Interesting link nonetheless, thanks.

------
antonvs
This is projection by people who are untrained in what they do.

Competent people with good training in some discipline are able to apply that
training to competently achieve goals. This allows them to apply knowledge
that they didn't develop themselves by trial and error, and is much more
efficient, with better outcomes than the alternatives.

Unfortunately, this often seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
Although "seems" is the operative word: if it weren't for this effect, we'd
see many more bridges and buildings collapsing, ships sinking, etc.

It's just that many areas of human endeavour tend to more commonly involve
untrained people "winging it", and that's what the article focuses on.

~~~
johnjohnsmith
I'd like to offer a few decades of perspective on your claim.

I've been programming for 30+ years. When I sit down to code, most of the time
I've thought through it before even typing and am ~99% confident I won't hit a
roadblock. I've spent half my life mastering my programming skills.

BUT: I'm a high-level technical lead / product lead, so I only get to write
code a few times a month and it is more for stress-release because I've
mastered it (and because I am a mentor to / lead 30+ programmers and this
gives me a chance to interact with them).

If I wrote code 100% of the time I'd being winging it 1% of the time. So in
this regard you are correct.

However, because of how corporations work, once you've demonstrated
proficiency at "junior level work" you move up to the next big challenge. Yes,
that sounds pejorative, but coding is not hard compared to the next levels of
competency: programming is junior level, software architecture is senior
level, product roadmap is staff level, corporate direction is above that.
Sorry if that hurts your butt, but knowing the latest JS framework or how to
optimize your C++ is trench-work compared to convincing the CTO where your
division should invest its R&D budget for the next 5 years.

Because there is no "school" for learning how to plan your company roadmap,
you really do have to wing it and learn from experience. And since shit is
changing so fast... well, sure there are basic principles studied is business
(that sometimes are useless for strategy but are good for tactics)... but in
tech, it very much is "wtf is going to happen next and is this the right
choice." Sure there is an executive board, and vice presidents gunning for
your role, but you REALLY are winging it at C-level unless you are in your
70's and have helmed multiple large companies.

So from a top's down view from higher-importance positions, winging it is
simply part of the job.

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
Great perspective. My takeaway is that people today are still overall
undereducated. Business skills and corporate strategy should be taught
earlier, at the highschool levels, instead of requiring a dedicated MBA.

~~~
wallacoloo
> Business skills and corporate strategy should be taught earlier, at the
> highschool levels, instead of requiring a dedicated MBA.

How would you teach corporate strategy in a way that’s simultaneously honest
(and useful to the individual) and palatable?

Maybe if you limited yourself to strategy within coops, where the individual’s
incentives really are aligned with the incentives of everyone else in the
organization, or mid-level management, where you only have a certain category
of power - but that’s less useful because coops aren’t so common and mid-level
management is ultimately subjected to what the upper levels decide.

In the end, _individuals_ with positions where they have to worry about
“business skills” or “corporate strategy” don’t usually have incentives which
are aligned with the people at other rungs on the ladder. If you teach
corporate strategy in an honest fashion, a not-insignificant portion of your
material will be how to effectively redirect money from other areas in the
organization to yourself. Most of your students will see that at stealing.

Or maybe you don’t teach how to leverage these strategies, but just how to
spot them in action?

Either way, K-12 is traditionally focused on skills that are more foundational
and generally useful. Admittedly, that’s changing as some schools introduce
things like CS courses, but usually these are electives and not part of the
core curriculum.

------
ardit33
And that is not true at all, especially in sports.

When you just starting playing a new sport, you are still learning and going
along while making a lot of mistakes.

After few years of playing you learn enough (by experience or training), to
know what to do and how to act. (think shooting dribling, positioning in
soccer).

If you played your 'younger' self, you'd run circle around that person. Hence
training and experience matters a lot.

Same with engineering. While products change, some of the same patterns and
problems keep repeating over and over, and after few years of work you know
how to deal with them, avoid common pitfalls, etc....

So, people are truly "winging it" only when they are thrown to new
situations/discipline, but both experience and deliberate training gets you to
a level when you can anticipate events to a certain degree, and be proactive
towards them. That's not "just winging" anymore.

~~~
fphhotchips
I'd argue sports is the _exact_ example where not only is everyone winging it,
but where you _must_ wing it to be successful.

How good you are at winging it is defined by your training, but in a
competitive situation, if you're not constantly improvising to match the
current state of play, then your play will be entirely predictable and as a
result you'll be easily beaten. Think about a football team that runs one of
three corners every time. After _maybe_ a match, they'll be beaten by every
defense. Now think about a football team that makes subtle improvisations on
every corner they run based on the defense they're up against. Much, much
harder to study and defend.

~~~
joenathanone
There is an element of winging it in every profession but not 'totally'
winging it. Experience, training and practice matter.

------
dajonker
As I remember from an HR course at business school, studies have shown that
experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance (when hiring
someone; all else being equal).

~~~
daveguy
I'd have to see that study. It seems to me that experience gives you a lot of
information about what is not as important that comes in handy even when you
are "winging it" with something related.

Also, "experience is one of the worst indicators for job performance...all
else being equal" could mean a lot of things:

1) truly everything else being equal i.e. the person with less experience will
do better. (surely that is not the case)

2) Of everything, considered equally, experience is the least indicative of
performance compared to education, creative thinking, etc.

Can you link those studies and clarify what is meant by "worst indicators"?

Also, what job was that in the evaluated job performance? I know it's
definitely not true for trade skills like woodworking.

~~~
trendia
> In programming specifically, many studies have shown order of magnitude
> differences in the quality of the programs written, the sizes of the
> programs written, and the productivity of the programmers. The original
> study that showed huge variations in individual programming productivity was
> conducted in the late 1960s by Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968). They
> studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and
> found that the ratio of intitial coding time between the best and worst
> programmers was about 20:1; the ratio of debugging times over 25:1; of
> program sizes 5:1; and of program execution speed about 10:1. They found no
> relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or
> productivity. (Code Complete, page 548)

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-
programmi...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/skill-disparities-in-programming/)

~~~
wallacoloo
From what I can tell of the quote, it looks to be just the ability of an
engineer to successfully code a _new_ program? Does it touch on any of the
other roles of a computer programmer, such as the ability to break a large
task into smaller, incremental deliverables, arrange those deliverables in a
way that allows parallelism, communicating with the rest of the team to
actually make use of this parallelism, and before doing any of this actually
verifying that the thing you’re planning to implement is _really_ what the
customer needs? And of course, such work is usually done within an existing
system that you have to navigate and modify in a way that remains maintainable
(for example, writing the right types of tests, and creating the appropriate
types of abstractions). I would be stunned if one’s ability along those axes
plateaus within just a couple years of experience.

I guess, I’m just skeptical of this because I recently switched jobs from a
place where nobody seemed to know what was happening to one where everything
seems to be very well-polished. At both places, people generally are similar
in their ability to _write code_ that does a specific thing, but there’s a
night/day difference in how they do these other things. And I’m hesitant to
say that it’s because they just fundamentally aren’t good at those things,
because that can’t explain how I was also miserable at those other areas but
seem to be learning how to do them now that I’m in the right environment. In
other words, _I_ feel like my ability to meaningfully contribute to an
organization as a computer programmer is increasing with experience, and I can
see quite clearly that the people with more seniority at my present job are
generally capable of more effectively navigating the problem space than are my
coworkers fresh out of college.

------
bitxbit
Three buckets: (1) people who figured out how to do it right, (2) people who’s
yet to figure out how to do it right but can spot the things done right, and
(3) everyone else.

~~~
wallacoloo
No need to bucket like this. Rather split this into a 2-dimensional space
where one axis is “ability to do things effectively” and the other is “ability
to spot which things lead others to success”. The buckets suggest that there’s
a point at which a person is no longer able to learn from others, which is
dishonest.

------
ummonk
When you're a kid you think adults know what they're doing and that for any
issue there are people in charge who can and do make sure everything works
out. The biggest thing you learn by growing up is that this is most definitely
not the case.

Sometimes the person at the wheel is just winging it, and often there really
isn't even anyone at the wheel steering things.

------
zachd1_618
I rarely comment on articles but this resonates so strongly with me. It goes
beyond the pervasive “imposter syndrome”, and I think the point here ought to
be emphasized. Nobody knows what they’re doing, so throw out the perceived
deference and join them with full confidence and determination.

Anecdotal self promotion: I grew up doing manual labor (digging holes) and
whatnot thinking that the AP kids had their shit together. Same once I started
AP thinking about college. Then grad school in Aero engineering. Then real
aero engineers. Then real software engineers once I transitioned into true
software in ad tech. TLDR even when surrounded by ridiculously smart people
and out of your depth, I find that holding back because “they must know what
they’re talking about” is an unproductive mindset. It must be universal, and I
actually find that to be an encouraging fact. People aren’t predestined to
their task and even as a noob to a field or discipline, you may have valid
insight.

------
yarrel
The first time someone told something me this they felt they were being
helpful and reassuring. Why did everyone else know what to do and I didn't? Oh
don't worry, nobody does.

Nope. That's not helpful.

If there's no rulebook I can learn then that makes it worse not better.
Lacking an innate ability is not an improvement on lacking some learnable
knowledge.

------
bilifuduo
If you're interested in this concept of "everyone is winging it," here's a
collection of articles exploring this concept applied to other areas (like
startups + design):
[https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635](https://beta.sundae.space/collection/635)

------
jancsika
So Claude Shannon was "totally just winging it" when he wrote _A Symbolic
Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits_?

------
agumonkey
Question is: how do you reconcile that knowledge with the hiring process when
you don't like to lie.

------
ssivark
I wonder whether this is correlated with the adoption of the “fake it till you
make it” mantra.

------
chrisbolt
(2014)

------
fenwick67
This advice is particularly good for perfectionists like myself.

------
jiveturkey
I think the OP was winging it. This is from 2014.

------
rossdavidh
Should have a (2014) in the title

------
newname2018
That old maxim rings true: Fake it till you make it.

