
Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer (2012) - dsr12
https://a16z.com/2012/08/09/rehabilitating-the-arrogant-engineer/
======
SirensOfTitan
I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of
quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports
metaphors.

> I’ve had the privilege of spending my entire career in technology surrounded
> by wicked smart engineers. I’ve always been drawn to their raw intelligence,
> Spock-like rationality, sincere honesty, dry humor and quirkiness. With the
> immense popularity of the sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory”, I suppose I’m not
> alone in my appreciation of them.

Almost none of the characters on Big Bang Theory were engineers, they were
physicists. This article seems to conflate 'nerd' with 'engineer' on an
incredibly surface level exploration.

... and before anything is actually stated, it moves over to use sports
metaphors to accent how important teamwork is.

The awful truth is that arrogance, inability to delegate, poor communication,
poor ability to react to feedback are traits that are rampant in pretty much
every industry, including VC. Picking out engineers are some type of specific
'archetype' especially bad at these skills is buying into awful stereotypes
about engineers as if we have no social skills.

~~~
s-shellfish
There are lots of experiences that are very specific to technical people.

These experiences are not easily communicated.

It's possible that we all go through similar quirky experiences that yield
absurd and seemingly arrogant behavior because of these particular intracicies
of working so closely with machines. It's also nice to have personal privacy
when we know we are responsible for so much data and information about people.

It's possible that this winds up looking like arrogance, but isn't actually.
It's just people going through a thing that honestly, most humans just don't
go through.

Not every person experiences life in the following way. I'm around tons of
people I could see as arrogant or judgemental or whatever ( and myself the
same, if not much more so than everyone else I know ) but honestly it's more
like, when software doesn't work correctly, there becomes an odd sort of
recurrence relation between the source of the issue and the outlet, and how
that maps onto how one sees their self and others. And I honestly think most
people who work with machines are so used to seeing that pattern that they
understand the dynamic enough to not judge, just slowly hope their additions
to the systems they work on get noticed enough to improve the whole process.

So yes, it's an inability to communicate, but we understand one another,
because we can explain it with math or code, which most people don't care
about. Golden rule. You don't give a shit about my knowledge, I don't give a
crap about yours. If you think I'm being arrogant, please try to figure out
whether you'd actually like to experience life like this first, where
everything is chaos and crazy and nothing the world says makes sense, because
most people just don't want to deal with the details of actually understanding
how hard it is to get a machine to do exactly what they want it to do, and how
hard it is to avoid having that character defect mapping over into one's own
social life at all times, as though one must be on constant guard for the oh
so you're terrible exhibition of being both aware of being smart, and actually
being intelligent at the same time.

We don't have social skills like most people. That's fine. Why is that a bad
thing? Those people wear lack of knowledge of logic and mathematics as though
it were some badge to be proud of. Which is again, fine! Just don't force me
into your archetype of having social skills.

~~~
commandlinefan
> winds up looking like arrogance

I'm seeing more and more accusations of arrogance leveled at "engineers" (but
usually they mean programmers). I think this is because they're no longer
allowed to stuff us in our lockers and push our heads in the toilets, so they
have to be more subtle when they bully us.

~~~
pdimitar
This is very likely true, sadly. Doesn't help them that some of us grew to be
big men with karate and aikido background either. So they try to vent
insecurity through other venues.

These days I just laugh in such situations.

------
CompelTechnic
I've got a pet theory.

I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a
moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills. To put it
another way: The technical problem is so big that it occupies your brain for
weeks and months at a time. Any social interaction requires context-switching
out of the technical problem, which is expensive and stressful.

Hence the stereotype that engineers are bad at social skills. If we were ever
given enough time to decompress, we'd get right along.

~~~
pygy_
_> I often feel like carrying the weight of technical decision making on a
moment-to-moment basis is what makes engineers bad at social skills._

That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally
inhibit one another.

Edit: that being said, it means that it's hard to do both things at the same
time, but you can alternate between both modes.

~~~
wolfgke
> That's correct. The logical and emotional parts of your brain literally
> inhibit one another.

I don't know whether this is true or not. But I am sure that when I do
mathematics, I have very strong emotions. These are of a very different kind
than the emotions that you find described, say, in a novel. I came to the
conclusion that neither the English nor the German language have words for
these emotions.

~~~
pygy_
That's very interesting. What I described is the general case, you may have an
unusually wired brain, triggering logic/emotions synesthesia.

The emotions you describe are reminiscent of the "Martian colors" described by
a colorblind synesthete who could see words in colors, including colors his
eyes could not trigger in his brain.

Richard Feynman was notoriously synesthete. He could see math in color
(builtin syntax highlighting :-).

------
tptacek
I'm not sure I've ever read a clumsier, more tone-deaf introduction to a blog
post.

~~~
crististm
What did you see in it that was so off? The idea, the choice of words, the
"nerd credentials"? I'm trying to see what could have been avoided to make it
better.

~~~
pdimitar
Too much stereotyping, almost zero context, bold claims on topics that are
highly subjective and vary wildly from person to person.

These were the things I found myself categorizing the post into as I was
reading it.

------
AndrewKemendo
I was having a related debate on Twitter with YC's Michel Seibel earlier today
[1].

My argument is that organizations, and most strikingly in technology startups
& Venture, generally place no value on leadership ability. VC's and others
will claim that they "invest in people." In my experience that simply means
that "people," poorly defined, are one of the many vectors for which a company
is judged. Primary of which is whether people get along well together, rather
than if they can make hard leadership decisions in a way that is constructive
and progressive.

As a result, while "team" is a consideration, no qualities of leadership or
management will be able to compete for venture dollars or talent with a
company that is growing like crazy. Said more concisely:

"Investors will always take an A+ Product with C- leadership over a C- Product
with A+ leadership."

That seems to make sense in the short term, but at scale, when leadership and
management matters, things historically get hairy. In the even longer term,
this attitude shapes an entire culture where covering bad management over with
growth and revenues - something not unique to technology certainly.

The primary argument I see in valuing traction over leadership in the early
days, is that it's _Hard_ to judge someone's leadership without working with
them. I would agree with that, but I don't think it's any harder than any
other level of technical due diligence. Where I think it's intractably harder,
is when the person or team has absolutely no track record of leadership or
management, like many young founders.

The community assumes you can teach or coach your way into Leadership, and
that's certainly true to some extent, but it underestimates how hard it is to
do well, and how catastrophic it is when it goes really badly. On the other
hand the old trope of "bringing in adult supervision" really undermines the
concept of founder run and employee owned companies.

I think the market would be better off in the long term funding and supporting
founders with track records of leadership, but I honestly don't see that
happening anytime soon.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554](https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1016723207997591554)

~~~
hinkley
My second employer out of college was a very charismatic man. Talked me out of
quitting twice. The third time I went in and just repeated that this was my
two week notice, without listening to a single thing he said, until he took
the piece of paper in my hands.

If I were a VC I can imagine wanting to stay away from people who can talk me
into anything. I might end up funding another round after the building is
already on fire.

So I wonder if they are always clear on the difference between leadership and
salesmanship. I'm not sure I can always distinguish the two, more's the pity.

------
Animats
Yet engineers tend not to be sociopaths, while that's common in top
management.

~~~
skookumchuck
> while that's common in top management

I've heard that before. It smacks of confirmation bias promulgated by envious
people.

~~~
Animats
No, it's reasonably well accepted. See [1][2]. The trouble is, there's
considerable overlap between the traits needed for becoming a leader and
sociopathy.

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-
dis...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-
link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership/#1a2faa624104) [2]
[https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_wor...](https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_workplace_sociopath/)

~~~
skookumchuck
Your first link says 3%. That's not "common". The study's sample size was 203,
a pretty low number for statistical confidence.

I have no doubt it is "reasonably well accepted" that it is "common" for
business leaders to be psychopaths, because it's what people want to believe,
but the cited evidence for it doesn't show that at all.

~~~
pdimitar
I respect your remark about the small sample size but there aren't that many
CEOs out there, would you not agree?

~~~
skookumchuck
There are quite a bit more. Every corporation has a CEO, and there are lots
and lots and LOTS of smaller corporations. Also, the claim was for "top
management", and that's another order of magnitude.

With 203 samples, all it would take is a couple people one way or the other to
get that 1% rate of the general population. How accurate is the test, even?
There's also selection bias in who consents to the test - I wouldn't consent
to a psychoanalysis test because of privacy issues. Lastly, I bet a few of the
participants were able to see what the researchers were driving at and had a
bit of fun with the answers.

I.e. the conclusion is simply junk science, even setting aside the notion that
3% makes it "common".

------
slededit
The Big Bang Theory is an insulting characture. While some developers may like
it - it's not really best way to endear yourself to a group of people.

~~~
HumanDrivenDev
What annoys me most about that show is that 3 physicists and a mechanical
engineer are often shown writing working software. That's rarely the case.

~~~
Aloha
Physicists and Mechanical engineers, often do write software.

So do a whole host of other people.

~~~
jacquesm
I once had to untangle a hairball of stuff made by someone with enough titles
that his last name tended to fall off the line or be clipped. Having a degree
in physics or mechanical engineering does not automatically make you a (good)
programmer.

Dijkstra would have had a fit.

It was interesting software (finite element analysis) but until it was just
about completely rewritten absolutely un-maintainable. Which was a bit of a
problem because it was also buggy.

~~~
wolfgke
> I once had to untangle a hairball of stuff made by someone with enough
> titles that his last name tended to fall off the line or be clipped.

In my experience, the problem rather is that in science, the intention of the
code is to be able to run well enough such that one or two papers can be made
out of it and after that, it may be forgotten.

For this purpose, this kind of coding is actually decent and (unluckily)
investing time in good software engineering practises would mean that you have
less time for writing papers.

In this sense, I would be cautious to call this kind of code "bad", but rather
say that if you write code for a company, the priorities are very different.

~~~
jacquesm
That code was old rather than bad. And I had the distinct feeling that whoever
wrote it simply did not have a lot of background in software and had a job to
be done no matter how it got done. And then that code started a life of its
own because the software did work most of the time. Edge cases (sometimes
literally edge cases: edges of networks of steel trusses) would sometimes give
the weirdest results and upon closer inspection you'd find lots of errors in
the rest of the output, just not large enough to immediately cause suspicion.

In the end it all worked out and it was a very good lesson in trying to keep
the output stable while refactoring the code. This was well before 'TDD'.

------
SketchySeaBeast
>> I’d give out a one-page handout I’d written titled, “Tips for Working
Successfully in a Group.” We’d go over it, line by line. Some students found
my tips beneath them. They rolled their eyes. But the most self-aware students
embraced my advice

Sounds like that arrogance didn't necessarily get fixed....

------
Felz
Beware the fundamental attribution error.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

If somebody comes off as a jerk and doesn't appear to listen to you, it's
almost certainly not because that is their "nature". They likely have reasons
and incentives for acting like that. Possibly other people really _aren't_
helpful to them, and they haven't yet learned the fine political art of
pretending otherwise.

If you want to hire a bunch of very smart people who are also very pliable,
and won't question you even if they disagree- well, good luck. Start with
naive college grads, probably.

~~~
s73v3r_
I really fail to see how your last paragraph has anything to do with the rest
of the comment.

------
duxup
It sounds like he read a good book, but that article really doesn't say
anything about actually "Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer", just that he
read about it, kinda.

------
hinkley
A little OT, but:

> I spent part of my childhood dreaming of being Captain James T. Kirk… I
> seriously believe that I became a better teacher and colleague by watching
> Kirk run the Enterprise. Kirk was not the smartest guy on the ship.

And that's the main reason I never liked Voyager. Kate Mulgrew's character
_was_ the smartest person on that ship, and she made sure everybody knew it.
Which is a shame because I always thought she deserved more screen time.

------
imajes
It's also worth noting that this article is 5 years old. Perhaps the tone is
reflective of that..

------
sanj
Maybe we should all read the book instead on commenting on its review.

------
myWindoonn
VC blog says that engineers should be less arrogant, more pliable towards VC
requests. Cool story from people who want power and don't understand technical
problems.

~~~
ThorinJacobs
Could you provide some examples of times when being arrogant improved the
quality of the product you delivered?

I've certainly run into arrogant engineers in the past. I spent the 2-3 weeks
after the worst of them left cleaning up his bug-ridden, brittle code. If he
had worked more collaboratively, it wouldn't have had to be that way.

~~~
myWindoonn
Correctly identified that a product would be a GDPR problem. Said product's
main feature was deanonymizing non-consenting visitors.

Insisted that certain metrics should be recorded, ended up identifying massive
gaps in SLA, improved overall QoS.

Was asked to give SRE and Devops advice to a team. Told them to document their
"regular tasks"; that is, to write down a doc "How to Upgrade Frob Databases"
so that they would have a way to do all the "Upgrade Frob Database for
Customer #xxx" tickets on their kanban board. Got pushback. Wrote the docs for
them anyway. Their kanban board drained over the next two sprints.

Edit: In all cases, got massive pushback from _management_ and never from
_devs_ nor _engineers_. Was called "arrogant", "troublemaker", "enabler",
reprimanded, etc. You asked for examples, you get examples.

~~~
ThorinJacobs
Forgive me, but these don't sound like instances of arrogance. You've pointed
out flaws in execution or feature, and I would do the same, but that's not
arrogance. That's just doing your job as a developer.

Maybe you achieved these in an arrogant way? I'm not going to deny that you
can get things done being arrogant. But I don't think it's necessary to
getting things done right.

~~~
pdimitar
I think he is saying that he got _labeled as arrogant_ because he was not
respecting internal office drama and human specifics which were getting in the
way of him trying to do his job well. Is that arrogant? It's very context-
specific but I'd claim that most of the times it is not.

People calling other people offensive names in offices happens way too many
times. Way too many managers and teams got too warm & fuzzy & comfy (and
unproductive) and any newcomers who want to get shit done are labelled as
"rocking the boat" although not literally but with a ton of euphemisms to
conceal the core idea -- like those your parent commenter already mentioned
("troublemaker" etc.).

------
skookumchuck
> I was stunned to find every one of these observations called out
> specifically by Randy in his lecture.

That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone.
It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone.

~~~
wolfgke
> That's because every one of those "observations" applies to most everyone.
> It's the same reason why astrological horoscopes apply to everyone.

Example from psycholoy:

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301)

By the way, the statements in the

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&oldid=838924301#Early_research)

paragraph actually describe me rather badly (I am badly described using
"wishy-washy statements"), so I believe this effect hardly works on _me_.

