
Everything's Made Up and The Points Don't Matter - raganwald's posterous - bowline_nc
http://raganwald.posterous.com/everythings-made-up-and-the-points-dont-matte
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yan
Am I in the minority in thinking this didn't need a clarification?

It was aimed at a technical audience that would likely catch the humor and
direct signs of fiction. I do realize that the impact of the story led to its
larger audience, but this does not change the original intent.

The ambiguity in story telling (and music, and art, and ..) adds depth.
Clarifying it after the fact, with the proverbial lights on removes depth.

Also, comparing Reginald to Mike Daisy non-ironically is very disingenuous.
Mike went on national news outlets to pitch his show and highlighted it as
fact rather than performance. He was warned that performing on TAL will lead
to its scrutiny as a journalistic report and he still went ahead, _knowingly
misleading the public_.

~~~
notatoad
regardless of who it was aimed at, it ended up on the front page of reddit.
and we all know how reddit is about believing stuff, and then how they react
when they find out they've been 'lied' to.

i'm sure at least a few people have threatened to kill raganwald's cats by
now.

~~~
raganwald
Strangely, the amount of anger people feel when their beliefs are revealed to
be false is proportional to the leap of faith they had to make to believe them
in the first place.

Think of that leap of faith as being personal investment.

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poink
My takeaway from this post is that raganwald drastically underestimates the
complexity of Enterprise Java FizzBuzz.

~~~
astrodust
It starts with an abstract factory class and ends with a SOAP RPC interface.

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dagw
I just assumed that Team FizzBuzz was him anonymising the actual team
involved.

~~~
JamesLeonis
I did as well. His story seemed a bit far fetched, but not outside the realm
of possibility. I did a quick search to see if he did quit his company before
I realized what he was really saying. That really hit home with me about how
easily it would be for a company to institute this kind of policy and how it
might backfire.

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mahmud
Fake activism hurts real activism. Please label your fiction as such.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amina_Abdallah_Arraf_al_Omari>

~~~
clintjhill
I don't intend to minimize your point, rather I want to point out that if you
are saying "don't write unless it's real" you are really truly stepping over
what value creative writing provides. Even to disclaimer is to say ignore what
was written because it isn't real.

Creative writing for satire or parody are critical aspects of humanity. It is
unfortunate when lives are at stake as a result. But there are so many
writings in human history that do this - what is your proposition for those?

~~~
rada
The parent clearly did not say "don't write fiction" but rather "label fiction
as such".

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one-man-bucket
Team Fizz Buzz is not an unreasonable team name! Or is the norm out there for
teams to name themselves to whatever they are working on?

Our current teams are named: "Team America 2", "Kill Kenny" and
"Etablissemanget" ("The Establishment" in swedish)

~~~
raganwald
You may have something there, I do recall meeting a member of Apple’s System
Seven team, and his business card read:

Omniscient Thaumaturge, Blue Meanies Group

~~~
one-man-bucket
Not bad! On a similar note Etablissemanget adopted "treating objects like
women" as their slogan.

~~~
darklajid
Where do you work and how can I apply for a job? :)

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kenrikm
I got a laugh from the FizzBuzz team part. Actually from what I know of
Corporate IT I think it might actually take a team "several months" to
implement. I was once told by corporate IT guys that it would take "Three
Months" to move one of our machines into the DMZ, I got another Internet
Connection and set it up myself in 30 minutes. As you can guess they were VERY
unhappy about that as it made them look like ... well.

~~~
stevewilhelm
Did that thirty minutes include a the appropriate security audit?

~~~
kenrikm
Some context: The connection was for an appliance provided by a trusted vendor
that only needed access from specific outside IP addresses and would not need
to be exposed to any internal systems, it could be locked down. There was no
way around needing external access and we only had two weeks to finish the
project (it was requested by the President of the company because it was
requested by a large client) however we were still faced with "it will take so
much work, that it will be 3 months" In the end we were able to implement what
was requested on time and the customer was happy. Roadblocks like these are
why startups are able to run circles around large companies, unless there is
someone inside to bulldoze through the red tape things just don't get done.

------
CaptainZapp
You know, some time ago I decided it's much more important that a story is
interesting, then that it,s true.

And your story was just brilliant.

~~~
pavel_lishin
What's your take on Mike Daisey's Chinese Apple factories controversy?

~~~
raphman
There is a difference between not telling that a story is not true (raganwald)
and explicitly telling that a story is true (Daisey).

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brudgers
Ah, The Agony and Ecstasy of Reganwald.

Amidst accusations that his concept was lifted from Mr. Daisey, can we expect
him to say, "I am not a crook?"

~~~
raganwald
Mike named specific companies and denied that he was making up his experiences
when asked. I can sleep at night about writing that particular piece of
fiction and following it up with disclaimers on Twitter, here on HN, and on my
blog.

~~~
brudgers
And here I thought you had gone most impressively meta with your commentary.

Essays are often only marginally more journalistic than muck-raking fiction.

In my mind, it is the kind of project you could pull off.

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michaelochurch
I feel like there's an American Spring going on. Before 2012, people have been
very reluctant to blow whistles on unethical activities in their own
companies, for fear of losing their jobs (likely) and damaging their career in
the long term (unlikely, but much scarier). That seems to be changing, with
the NYT Goldman Sachs article and various revelations coming out in Silicon
Valley. People are finally speaking out about ethical violations (such as the
gross violation of policy inherent in a Facebook walk-through in a job
interview process) that, a few years ago, people would have been terrified to
disclose.

People keep silent about all kinds of scummy things that are happening because
of fear, but it's the silence that allows bad actors to have as much success
as they do.

In light of this, I think a lot of people, who have nothing to do with
raganwald and don't know who he is, _wanted_ the resignation letter to be
real, not fictional.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
> _That seems to be changing, with the NYT Goldman Sachs article and various
> revelations coming out in Silicon Valley._

Which revelations out of Silicon Valley?

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stevewilhelm
Is Mr. Braithwaite a technical lead or a director? Did he resign or is he just
at the pub? Now I don't know what to believe.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a quick way to find the answers to these
questions.

~~~
raganwald
<http://braythwayt.com/>

