It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you answer to don't know the details of what you do, you can totally make stuff up, explain failures with magic or noise, and pump yourself up by claiming something you did was more difficult than it was, combined with talking like you know everything - the more confident the better. You often get to make your own estimates as well, so moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week.
In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them.
I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.
I've been in teams where more than half of the people were, for lack of a better term, quiet bullshitters.
Everything was "difficult" and "required analysis". The code mostly worked, but was full of workarounds that would not have been there if someone spent half an hour reading the library documentation.
One thing they didn't do though was stick their head out too much as that was too great a risk to their cushy positions.
Why do they do that, one might ask? Turns out they're either busy with house renovation or have some kind of engaging hobby which takes most of their time.
I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong.
I must admit, for most of my career I've been a "quiet bullshitter". I start with the best intentions but quickly get into situations that are far too difficult for me so I spend a lot of time covering up my problems with work for fear of being fired. ADHD plays a big part too. So I go to the meetings, I talk the talk at the job interviews and then fiddle with my computer getting nothing done all day. I've gone 6 months or more without shipping a line of production code. My code is generally quite bad and I don't know how to fix it, and now I'm in a more senior position it's too difficult to ask for help for extremely basic programming tasks.
My advice: many "quiet bullshitters" want to do better, but lack the tools, support and ability to do so. They're not trying to take everyone for a ride, but they feel backed into a corner with no way out and they can't ask for help without great personal risk (either real or perceived).
>I start with the best intentions but quickly get into situations that are far too difficult for me so I spend a lot of time covering up my problems with work for fear of being fired. ADHD plays a big part too.
Things can get very difficult very quick if a company has most of their knowledge stored in people's heads, and the main mode of spreading knowledge is meetings.
Having little documentation is common Having a high meeting culture makes this work for a part of the company, for a while. But even the good listeners at some point aren't sure enough about their knowledge that they would write about it. Making the problem worse.
AD(H)Ders will not be able to process any of this knowledge, because it's all dependent on listening to people. At some point they'll feel ashamed that they are in the project for years now and can't contribute properly.
If you do want to stay in this company, this strategy can work to make your life better:
1) Document everything, for yourself. Since you're ashamed of your lack of knowledge write up in private what you do know, or think you know. Since you keep it private nobody will see if you have something wrong.
2) When you need to something, you can test if this knowledge actually works as you wrote it up, you can refine it.
3) Once refined you can contribute it back to the main knowledge base.
4) If you don't know something, and can't find where it's documented, ask people to show you where it's documented. If it's not it's not a bad thing for a senior engineer to ask where it is documented. This saves face, and improves documentation.
Also: always ask people to write you emails if they want anything from you. Verbal is worthless.
That is a an interesting insight on BSing and I appreciate you being so upfront about it. Your response is why I like HN so much - you gave me an angle I didn't have to ruminate on.
I've met such people, hell, I've been such a person and to me this is different in a way that's not visible from the outside and that is (not) giving a single fuck whether this makes life harder for others in the long run.
Paraphrasing something one person told me(not the 3h guy, someone else):
"Look, I'm building a house right now and that's my main focus. I'm billed by the hour so if anyone finds out something is wrong with my work and orders me to fix it, then that's just more billable hours for me. I don't complain - at least there's work."
That last bit is specific to my corner of the world where the previous decades were marked by high unemployment.
I feel I’m in a similar position. It’s not that I’m not working but I’ll often realize, in hindsight, that I’ve spent way more time on something than it was worth. This kind of single track mind also has me waiting last minute to finish a lot of work when the deadline knocks me straight.
One thing I’m going to try is putting everything into some kind of planner. Like my own personal scrum board. I know your case is a bit different but curious if you’ve found some tips and tricks that helped
is this identical to "fake it till you make it"? so you climbe too high on carier lader and it's scary up there but you also dont want to climb down, ao you expect someone to come help you stay there. dont take this personally, but such cases make me angry, because most of the time it prevents competent but quieter people to rise, and pushes them away from competent deciasion making.
> I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover his ass should something go wrong.
Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload. Maybe he was downplaying the other rest of time that didn't feel like he worked at all even though he was in meetings and doing other BS the company required him to do.
> Three to four hours of deep work could be enough to complete the daily workload...
only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible. Perhaps you make a good faith effort to get 6 to 8 but you can't seem to do it, or you're too exhausted after 3 or 4, but you can't simply demand that you should get paid for 8 but you're only going to work for 3 or 4 because that's enough.
> only if you make a case that six to eight hours of deep work is somehow not possible.
6 to 8 hours of deep work is certainly possible but is it sustainable? I don't think so, minds need some slack time, enter a different mode of thinking, etc. For this reason work is chunked into workable amounts which it makes it sustainable as well.
My thesis is that in software it takes an expert to identify another expert, and outsiders struggle with being able to tell who's full of shit. You end up with pseudo-metrics like lines of code and random inspections of the last bit of code you wrote (e.g. muskian Twitter).
An experienced engineer with many products under their belt and tons of coaching of others on their track record will easily tell if someone knows what they're doing, especially if they get to pair program together for even 30 minutes.
As soon as you get away from what the interview prep books cover, it's usually pretty easy to tell if someone in your own field is experienced and at least competent, just by talking with them.
(Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies they're applying to were founded by students doing the opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals -- they were experimenting and building.)
I genuinely believe a 15 minute back and forth between an engineer and an interviewee will give a better signal for hiring than any hours+ long Leetcode 'assignment'.
I used to interview like this, until I hired the wrong person. They talked elequently about how to program, but just weren't very good at digging in to technical details of an existing codebase and understanding what was actually going on.
So I added an hour's pair programming on either toy problems or our existing codebase, depending what was suitable at the time. No leetcode, no months of prep for candidates, and our interview outcomes were much better.
There's a massive gulf between toxic leetcode hoop-jumping and a friendly chat.
While this may be true, it takes more than just engineering skill for this to work in a predictable manner. Often an engineering interviewer takes their ego into the process and it becomes a competitive game or an opportunity to show how smart they are.
I 100% agree with you but it's not as easy and scaleable as it seems.
Agreed, interviewer ego slipping in can be a problem.
Interviewer training can help avoid that happening accidentally.
(And Leetcode interviews don't avoid the interviewer ego problem. It's purportedly "objective", but the interviewer can easily taint it, accidentally or intentionally. The answer isn't Leetcode, but to train or reign in egos, and then you can use a real conversation.)
Leetcode also encourages people to 'roll their own' algorithms and cryptography. Even though most languages have standard libraries which cover all of it already.
This is the fundamental concept of filtering out bad research by peer review. Work is reviewed by people who know the field well enough to understand a paper.
Ideally we have this by code review, which should, theoretically, filter out the bullshit, but software development, as the original post in this thread says, may be overwhelmingly populated by bullshitters or people who honestly don't know their own lack of ability.
This is exaggerated by agism and completely discounting audited real experience over leetcode and small take home projects.
"lines of code" is not a pseudo metric. On large scale projects, statistical population density functions emerge, and if you need to manage such a project (like getting to the moon by X date) you can't just throw away the entire field of statistics because it says some things that you personally, anecdotally would like to dispute.
If my company is under contract to your company for a piece of software, and the software we (a team of 100 people) deliver is a million lines of code, and you ask for changes to the software that you believe fall under the contract and we believe do not fall under the contract, in any event the scale of the change, let's say it's 200K lines of code, does offer a pretty good estimate as to how long it takes to change, how much it cost, etc. as compared to the original deliverable, and wether and now such a difference of opinion might be litigated.
It's better compared to many other measures you might think of, though it's an interesting exercise to consider what might work better.
it's not a pseudo metric.
(source: I did some work for a litigation support/consulting firm, expert witnesses for defense contracting)
That's an interesting case that I hadn't thought of, or encountered myself, so thanks for sharing that!
We might be talking past each other here, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but how does the example you presented address the argument that "lines of code produced are not a useful metric for evaluating individual developer performance at hiring time"?
Another unpopular opinion; I’ve resorted to BSing these days cause let’s be real; vast majority of these startups are just fiat wealth rockets, hooking people on nation state scrip
This whole thread just feels like low effort coder bro chest bumping. Low effort appeal to non-existent authority.
What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)?
We’re just high priests avoiding real work of keeping ourselves alive.
> What real human problems have you all resolved that lifted the lowest in society without the kowtow to those of high net worth (another appeal to imagined authority)?
I'll admit that my profession is no more noble than say, a carpenter, and is primarily to fund my desired lifestyle. But I don't work at a startup and I don't make startup money and I'm certainly not a coder bro (after my time). I can't say I've "resolved" any real human problems either, but I do occasionally try to do something to help. Over the years I've coached youth sports, tutored reading and math for underprivileged or ESL kids, collected food for the local food bank, played harmonica in a jug band at the local old-folks home, taught after-school bike repair, do roadside cleanup, and was going to do books for inmates but it got cancelled due to COVID. And lest you think I'm trying to get into heaven this all comes from my cold dead atheist heart in the chest doing all that bumping. ;^)
Where is the moral quandary in moving to higher paying jobs? Employment is at will. If your company can't afford to lose you they are welcome to sign you to a long term contract like sports teams do with their players. But they never will because they lose the right to fire you whenever they want. You owe them nothing.
You may never see this, but I want to clarify. I have no qualms about jumping ship; I have and will again. I was referring to the morality of doing bad work and propelling oneself upward on the good work of teammates. Writing code that works but is impossible to maintain and selling oneself as a hero is, in my opinion, a Shitty Thing To Do.
I think daily stand up even encourages BS. Sometimes you really don't get much done in a day, but during standup it's got to sound like you did _something_ -- so how about some bs.
This is why we have to ensure that somebody asks at least one FizzBuzzesque question during interviews, and why you don't want to work at a place that doesn't ask you a FizzBuzzesque question.
Companies are welcome to make their interview processes more stringent to weed out bullshitters but they'd have to raise the salaries until they actually get enough non-BS candidates through the door.
That not happening suggests that "BS" is good enough for most companies in which case why should you bust your ass doing any better when it's just more work for yourself and is unlikely to get rewarded adequately?
If they're offering "market-rate" salary then they can get "market-rate" quality, and if BS became the new "market-rate" then I don't see anything wrong with that.
Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on. Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes is them speaking well in meetings/good at project planning/BSing some design.
The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be engineers and they either know and care about it, or they care and rely on input from other engineers to understand what is going on under the hood.
Every formalization of a workflow is susceptible to this.
I recall how when Git started getting widespread adoption, a popular blogpost theme was discussion of cleaning up your commits...which is the kind of thing you can do if you're writing in small increments. But code that "moves mountains" in the architecture, as is often the case in a greenfield project where there's a lot of learning being done, tends to have dirty rip-off-the-bandage moments. If you clean up those kinds of commits, it's not really beneficial to future code archeology. But if you're clocking minimal effort and maximum CYA, it suddenly becomes hugely important to dot the i's and cross the t's, because that looks more professional than a commit log where you iterate on it a bunch and your log is like "maybe it's fixed now?"
I have similar experience. I am always amazed that there's these rockstar personalities that start projects, hit trouble, and then pivot to a new project without every finishing anything. I kind of find it fascinating that these people are always framed as 'the best' etc etc.
These people are dangerous and the ones I watch for the most. I see them as a somewhat dark manifestation of the "Peter Principle". They are charismatic people full of ambition who want to climb the corporate ladder but lack the skills, leadership ability, and knowledge to actually do so based on merit. Some common behavior I have observed, 1) they never deliver bad news to leadership and are willing to lie or misrepresent to achieve this 2) they never will be responsible for the failing project (which they've caused to fail) and will immediately find a way to move to another project 3) they take credit for all successes regardless of their involvement in those successes 4) over represent their own contributions and constantly talk how busy they are and how little work everyone else is doing.
Combining the above they will move from project to project and position to position once a year or sometimes two years leaving the team or some poor soul who was recently promoted to take over their mess. Then when the project continues to fail they can shake their head to their boss and say, "Everything was on track when I left project. They must have really gone away from the original design for this to happen."
Agreed. Financial success and career progression as a software dev has little to do with your talent. It's more about luck and BS ability.
Most successful or fast-growing big tech companies can afford to brute-force every problem by throwing tons of developers at them.
Most developers tend to produce code which just barely works and is way overcomplicated but it
doesn't matter because most fast-growing companies don't have any issues hiring large numbers of developers to patch up the many mistakes by brute force.
This is even worse when average people strike it lucky and get on a successful project and get promoted. This leads to boundless bullshit and buzzword soup.
> moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week
As an aside, I always find this to be a funny example, because it's the kind of requirement that reeks of design mistakes (either UI design or code design). How did we end up in a place where a button was 1 pixel out of alignment? It can happen innocently enough with a true "defect", I've seen it, but more often it indicates either A) designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time or B) engineers are not using reusable styling frameworks/components.
Either way, ending up with a tiny task because a button is 1px out of place probably means you have been wasting hours of work and will continue to waste hours of work if you don't fix it the long way. Doesn't necessarily mean I would stretch that particular ticket out to a week, but I would certainly take a little bit of extra time to make sure we didn't have to fix the exact same problem again next week.
> designers are freeforming everything and wasting massive amounts of time
This is happening at my company. We had built a whole UI library and then the new UI design team came in and started designing everything with zero regard to our existing library. It has been a shitshow.
Bonus points because product likes their new designs more than the premade library, so they are fighting hard to throw out the library. Which we basically just finished building.
Add to this the amount of aversion to risk and to getting your hands dirty by pumping out code. It is so weird to see SWEs wanting to get into BFUDs before writing a line of disposable code (at least at big cos). Though I am sensing the perf process incentivizes this (impact and artifacts at all costs).
I've never seen somebody get fired for too often being late to ship, but I have seen someone get fired for shipping changes that too often break customer workflows.
Tangential but the comments about BS/non-BS reminded me of this classic Henry Rollins quote (from an essay about weightlifting):
>"The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."
When people see a BS-peddler they throw their hands in the air and say "you can't fool everyone all the time".
They are missing the point. You don't need to fool everyone all the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough.
I believe tech falls in the in between category. We all know that one person who is actually incompetent, but somehow has enchanted management. He might climb the ranks or get the good graces for a short time, jumping ship just at the right time.
Sure, in the long term everyone will realize this game, but the long term might not matter much. If you worked at the right time (let's say a long and strong bull market), player your cards right and got lucky, you might cash out and retire early before everyone gets wary of your BS.
You should realize if you've experienced this is probably not because they "enchanted management" as some sort of master manipulator playing 4D chess, but rather that management is so inept at their job that they can't tell the difference between a useful employee and a useless one.
Keep in mind that management might be bullshitting at their own level and actually benefits from having to manage a team of bullshitters even if the work can in reality be done by just one competent person.
Take a look at half the brochures for investment funds and it becomes evident. Somehow returns from 2008 get left out - or 2020 when COVID hit. Money managers are already gearing up to tout their returns once this recession starts to wind down.
> Playing the markets is about as real as a game can get. There is, of course, a divergence between expectations and outcomes, but the outcome has an inexorable quality about it. In most social situations---in politics and in personal and business relations---it is possible to deceive oneself and others. In the financial markets, the actual results do not leave much room for illusions. The financial markets are very unkind to the ego: those who have illusions about themselves have to pay a heavy price in the literal sense. It turns out that a passionate interest in the truth is a good quality for financial success.
And yet I know some personal wealth managers who are just about the most noxious people I've run across--their success is entirely due to connections, they're all about minimizing how much Uncle Sam "steals" from them, and they will talk your ear off about how undocumented immigrants are freeloaders. They're the very definition of being born on third base and thinking you've hit a triple.
This isn't to say that you're incorrect about macro investing, just that there are niches in such fields in which plenty of incompetent BS peddlers flourish.
This is not a good example. If you are in the tax avoidance game you better know the rules like the back of your hand. Because if you cross the line, all the BS in the world isn't going to save you from the consequences.
Is he still running it day-by-day? It averaged 20% annual return for 4 decades under his watch. So if he invested $1000 on day one he grew it to $1.5M by the end. And with the 66% loss he's still at $990K.
I understand that this is mainly an attack on another blogger, but I still don't like the tone of the article. I don't see the need for the strong language, and actually, if you try to replace it with something more civil, the cracks in the argument are becoming apparent.
What is BS? Being objectively wrong? How would we know that someone is objectively wrong or right eg in Finance (one of the fields mentioned)? Markets can stay irrational for longer than someone is alive - what does it mean for markets to be irrational from their perspective? Merton and Scholes received the Nobel Prize for their finance theories, yet the hedge fund they ran explicitly based on those theories collapsed spectacularly. Does this conclusively prove that their theory was BS, or were they just unlucky to catch a low probability event with a strategy that 'objectively' had a positive expectation (just playing devil's advocate here)? Let's look at another field OP mentioned where we should be able to say what's objectively true, science. Hendrik Lorentz's theories on how light travels through ether were objectively wrong (for all we know), yet they lead to special relativity. Does this make him a BS artist or not? Would the answer change if Einstein hadn't come along?
It seems that OP's argument would have been far less convincing if he'd bothered to try to be exact about his definitions instead of relying on the gut feeling that we all know what BS means. If the argument seems appealing, then the reason for that might lie more in the mind of the reader (who wouldn't like to rise above supposed BS artists?) than in insights about the world. Which makes me sad to say, because I generally had a high impression of Gelman.
No need to rely on a gut feeling: it's in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines bullshit as "to talk nonsense to, especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading." So it's not being objectively wrong, it's peddling nonsense. The term has come into popular use even among people who don't swear much, because it's precise and evocative.
Ok, I'll take that. Still not sure about the argument under that definition, though. There are disciplines where 'talking nonsense with the intention to deceive' would objectively be a smart strategy, eg Poker. However, Poker should fall under the 'no-BS' fields according to OP (he lists sports, and expressly mentions chess there; any sort of trash-talking in any sport would also fall under that definition, and trash-talking athletes can still be successful - it's quite common in martial arts eg). My guess is that the OP would argue that Poker or martial arts still are 'no-BS' fields, we just need a better definition of BS.
But that just shows that the argument doesn't work with this definition, and the onus is still on the OP of providing a definition that works for his argument (or we have to conclude that his argument doesn't work).
In finance you can absolutely thrive on BS. In fact the vast majority of finance jobs are BS and produce below average returns for their clients with very much above average fees. They even have their own astrology (TA)
It's funny because Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings almost all have leaky roofs but he kept building them to the point that flat roofs with odd joins are an inseparable part of his aesthetic.
You're probably thinking of Fallingwater, but most of FLW's buildings have conventional (sloped) roofs. Gehry and Calatrava on the other hand are known for leaky roofs (and walls, and windows, etc).
Product management feels like the kind of profession where you can get away with BSing. It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Easy to claim that the wins were thanks to you, and the losses just happened to be market conditions or luck of the draw.
> It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding.
Maybe for the higher-ups, the vice presidents and the CPO. But ask a single (experienced) engineer and you will get a pretty clear picture of whether the PM is adding value or not.
Are there anomalously few bullshit problems compared to other places you have worked? Is there weirdly little paperwork? Do other teams doing roughly similar work have ongoing problems that you just don’t have? Do you have weirdly few, oddly productive meetings?
Got it. If I'm understanding correctly, most of those qualities revolve around helping run a tight, low on overhead process where everybody is clear around priorities and what everybody else is working on?
Yeah. You come as close as possible to the product manager being the only point of contact outside the team because they know what everyone is doing and why they’re doing it in sufficient detail that they can do the communication work so everyone else can do the production work.
The reason why I was asking is that it sounds to me that we're talking about two different roles entirely.
Yours is indeed quite valuable, but would be often called "project manager", whereas the one I'm talking about is more the customer-facing stakeholder-convincing business-outcome-responsible "product manager". See the difference explained here: https://www.coursera.org/articles/product-manager-vs-project...
> Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen ...
I'm guessing that Tyler Cowen is on team crypto and the blog author is taking him to task w/r/t Cowen's past writing on FTX? I don't know the history. Cowen runs another blog called the Ethnic Dining Guide, "All food is ethnic food". It's considered to be a legit restaurant review blog, or so I thought until recently, when I went to a place where he praised the "goat tacos" as authentic and best. I asked the woman at the counter for "goat tacos" and she was perplexed, told me it's beef, there's never been any goat meat served there. The blog post was dated May 2022, here's the wiki entry for the dish:
"traditionally made from goat meat, but occasionally made from beef, lamb, mutton or chicken"
I don't know how he got it so wrong, if he takes his food review seriously, did he eat there at all, did he know what he was eating, or just read the first line of the wiki. So the proxy for being unreliable is leaning against him.
Back to the subject at hand, my spouse works in the space industry. He tells me there's considerably less bullshit in his work compared to my own because you can't really fake your way into fooling people you know how to build a component of a satellite, or rockets. There seems to be a lot of charlatan in dev and IT. There's not a 'Learn launch vehicles in 60 days' type of books, courses vs what's available for devs.
In both government and corporate worlds, people with long pointy leather shoes (I call them clown shoes) are invariably big talkers who are good at social climbing but don't know anything about how things work, and are completely unable to create anything. These people often wear bright pink shirts and such.
The guy who wears boring, practical, comfortable shoes is probably the guy who actually knows how to do things.
Corporations allow for infinite iterations of BSers because at the end of the day, if you're found out, you can always re-face, re-market, and rebrand. Also, once they get a win and a bag of cash is in their hand, now they have capital to help iterate and push their BS.
Need to buy more time and you have cash on hand, run the FTX effective altruism playbook and throw some cash at charities and media.
>Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about
I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency, it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield")
Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups.
Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible
Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde models", but not crypto itself.
It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had absolutely nothing to do with it.
FTX were definitely the most polished fraudsters and hucksters in the crypto community. That's saying a lot, given that the finest fraudsters and hucksters in the world competed to out-swindle, out-cheat, and out-hoodwink each other daily in the crypto community
But that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is math, code, and gigawatts
I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. While the degree itself might not confer any indication/promise of ability to do science, the place where it takes happens (universities/labs) offers a conducive environment to engage oneself in science. Be it funding, motivating peer group or networking opportunities, the exposure one gets from only a BS degree is astronomically less.
> I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree.
Tell it to Freeman Dyson. In philosophy you could tell it to Derek Parfit. There are quite literally tens of thousands of people with higher degrees than them in their fields who achieved nothing comparable.
They weren’t trying to though. People generally get Physics and Philosophy doctorates hoping to contribute something to human knowledge. If you never had any ambition to do that you can’t have failed to come close to equaling Dyson or Parfit because you were never trying to.
The more senior the role within a company, the more people can thrive on BS alone.
If an entry level employee is terrible, it will be obvious in a matter of days. It takes years for bad hires at the VP level and above to be recognized.
Marketing is the ideal field for BS, especially SEO. Few people know what you do, ever fewer can tell if it's working or not, and it's easy to find (or fake) stats to fit any story you want to give.
Journalism and media is a pretty good one there too, though obviously more with the tabloid/internet blogging side than with the more respected outlets. Very easy to fake stories and sources, and if cases like Stephen Glass are to be believed, you can get away with it for years even then.
Their first field is sports... now, they aren't wrong in that if you are the last player at the end of the bench on an NFL team, you are still a really amazing athlete and still going to get paid well. What strikes me though is the number of "just ok" players, especially quarterbacks, who get paid as though they are a future hall-of-famer... and then fall very, very flat. Case in point - Zach Wilson had a big pro day that built up his hype, and thus got drafted high, but has been outplayed by no-name guys. A non-quarterback, Jadevon Clowney, had a monster hit in a college game that garnered significant interest - but frankly, a pretty pedestrian career. I could probably cite about ten more quarterbacks who got paid big money as though they were going to be superstars, but ended up being middling players and had relatively short careers. Somebody like a Brock Osweiler comes to mind - it was the sports equivalent of a pump-and-dump. I would argue that these players are the equivalent of thriving on BS - they had a moment or they had a hype machine around them, but didn't deliver the goods.
I think that it's interesting that it's BS that's the focus. Are there many fields where you can thrive on non-BS alone? You could be a great sports player, but without some amount of BS you might not get noticed or believed.
This is a good article, but I don't think Philip K Dick is a good example of either BS or the in-between. The literary equivalent of getting by with BS is the shallow, derivative work ghostwritten for a celebrity that's been preloaded onto the NYT best seller list, then trotted around all the vapid talk shows for promotion. They might have great sales, and plenty of people might read their book, but they're not creating literature.
Why is Finance in the "in-between" category? Finance is the single biggest and most important field for thriving with B.S. If you're an influencer, or a public personality, and you can convince people you're good with money, that's it: you've won, you're rich.
You might be bad but not malicious (Jim Cramer), you might be bad and malicious (Logan Paul), you might be some other thing where you're making highly contestable claims but it doesn't matter because investors throw their money at you (Elon Musk), you might even be in that same industry and a plain old fraud who got caught (Nikola, Trevor Milton).
As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.
If you're making financial decisions based on your ideas you'll fail if you're a bullshitter. If you're just giving people advice, not putting your money where your moyth is, sure, but then you're not really doing finance, you're just bullshitting full time.
Steroids won't make a champion out of somebody who is a loser in that sport. You still have to "have it". Steroids make a champion out of a person who is already champion material, or very close to it.
conveniently replaces Academia with Science. People are not paid for science, but for being academics
You can BS your way even to High journals as an academic. You cannot fall, unless you are cancelled. There is little downside once you made your way in.
In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your audience.
I get the sense that the vast majority of professional investors are just being swept around by the tides of the market. Over the past 70 years in the United States, that has generally been upward. Until they get dashed against the rocks, but the professional consequences are so low that they can pick themselves up and start again once the tides are better. People attribute so much individual human agency to financial professionals, but 99.9% of them are at the mercy of forces outside of their control, like technological advancement, population growth, federal reserve policy, and globalization.
It works exceptionally well based on data. You can pull up almost all of the actively managed mutual funds on something like morning star and compare them to an sp500 or total market index fund. Once you pull the time horizon out to 30 years, you will basically see zero funds that outperform the indexes. Most underperform based on just performance. But all of them underperform once you take the fees into account. So basically every actively managed fund is being run by someone who is faking it.
Hedge funds are supposed to be uncorrelated, but I don't think many long-only equity funds make that claim. They just count it a win if they do better than the market (which often happens, but seldom continues).
Then there are the financial advisors. Last time I talked to one, the selling point was nothing but "trust us, we have a team of Ph.Ds."
You'd be surprised. There is an entire "Fund of Funds" industry for example[1] that literally just takes people's money and takes a fee for putting it in other people's funds. The people putting money in the FOF could just as easily put it in the other funds themselves (the FOF disclose which funds they are in) and would get more money because they would have one less layer of fees to pay. Yet it exists. Their returns are intrinsically poor[2], their rationale for existance (that they do additional due dilligence on the underlying funds) is manifestly untrue[3].
[1] Check out people like skybridge capital as the most high-profile example https://skybridge.com/
Let's say you get paid a 2% management fee (on funds under management) and a 20% incentive fee (levied only on gains).
What keeps you from investing half your clients making bets in one direction, and the other half making bets in the opposite? If you do this, what total fees do you collect? How long can you follow this strategy?
In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them.
I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.