A colleague of mine at a company I worked at, very intelligent, would often hurl this verbal weapon out at anyone delivering any kind of technical presentation. He was a very deep thinker and always had incisive insights. It was both a treat, and also terrifying to see him essentially interrogate the presenter. I only had to go before him one time, and it was both a test of one's knowledge of the material, and a measurement of one's emotional fortitude.
As for the question, the answer was almost always "No, you are missing nothing. The rest of us simply do not exist on the same level as you do".
I'm hoping when you say "interrogate the presenter" it led to some constructive collaboration and not just meaningless nitpicks or dick waving.
I'm also hoping the people you worked with could tell the difference. If not, I hope you ran away from such a place. It's rare for someone truly that much smarter than everyone else to stick around without management siloing them into more focused work.
Also, I hope you meant presentations about theoretical or engineering work and not some vague business goal. If it's the latter most of us reading this would have similarly ripped it apart (constructively), hence the need for management especially at bigger orgs. The best way to handle vague business goals is to present it to upper management and let the implementation details be filled in by their team if they agree to proceed with work.
He was very strict, valuing correctness and rigidity, but entirely well meaning. It was never about showcasing superiority, nor was it ever nitpicking. Being in the spotlight though, it could certainly feel like an attack. And in some cases it was, but it was an attack on the idea, not on the person. He was ruthless, but rarely ever wrong.
Unfortunately one person is sufficient to spoil "a place".
I am currently in this exact situation in my team. While I love everyone and really like what I do now, it became "the team vs that one guy". Which is ridiculous as he's supposed to be the pillar of the product.
So here we are, the strongest part of the team became the biggest risk.
Listening is a skill hard to master. Especially when you have no plans to try.
> Unfortunately one person is sufficient to spoil "a place".
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you have a lot of inexperienced people spoiling the place, not "that one guy".
> So here we are, the strongest part of the team became the biggest risk. ... he's supposed to be the pillar of the product.
The big risk is management dropping the ball not willing to coordinate your product better and depending too much on one person. If it really is such a long bridge to cross between your SME and everyone else you have to accept that the product will be as bad as the dumbest person on your team. The product has to be well understood by everyone, not just one person. You might lose your only talent here if you can't hire better people to fill in the rest of the team.
> I love everyone and really like what I do now
Not to be too harsh but this should be the lowest priority business goal. Joy at work is just one tactic to retain employees. If your people can't get acceptable work done in the first place you can't expect anyone to be happy.
How can I say this more bluntly? Don't abuse your smartest people to keep lesser people employed and happy?
> Not to be too harsh but this should be the lowest priority business goal. Joy at work is just one tactic to retain employees.
I whole heartedly disagree. Happiness is more than just about retention. It's also about efficacy of your employees. Happy employees do better work and produce more.
Paying employees more works wonders when you're making them pick up slack.
Maybe I was too subtle in implying that the path to success in such a situation is to pay the SME more and crack the whip and refuse raises on the ones dragging things down until they quit. I'm pretty sure they have been with the company too long and/or have managed to avoid work thus far only hurting themselves and the company long term. Treating them well won't do anything if they take it for granted. The next round of hires should keep these lessons in mind.
You can absolutely have a great workplace full of happy people, but you need to build that on a foundation of competence and respect. Happiness is a lot of little things done right. It's the result, not the cause.
> Happy employees do better work and produce more.
Employees who do better work and produce more are happy when they're working with peers who do the same.
One of my main poles is “how much do I give a shit about this business and the people running it”, but I never see that mentioned when people discuss employee motivation.
I’ve never worked with people whose happiness depended on productivity. It’s always been assumed that it worked the other way around.
> How can I say this more bluntly? Don't abuse your smartest people to keep lesser people employed and happy?
There is absolutely nothing in situation described by me, that fits this sentence. I'd like to explain that but you (?) already gave downvote to my comment, so it will likely just make me feel worse that I wrote a wall of text that no one will read.
I actually still agree with points you made, as a general advise.
I know what camp I'm in. I have engaged in discussions around a difficult problem I solved, only to have one crowd come out and explain the algorithmic simplicity.
As an ex-TA in a science program, for the love of god just cite your source if you want to paste a wall-o-text. The differences between a lit review and research are in your goals, imho.
No, they take their roots from the early years of IBM. Xerox never had anything to do with these. You are clearly misremembering something or you have no clue what you are talking about. Please take a seat and don’t speak until spoken to.
Please. The idiots at Xerox PARC were great at regurgitating the successes of Bell Labs, but their convoluted solutions revealed just how little they actually understood the elegant theory behind their clumsy missteps.
> Am I missing something here?
A colleague of mine at a company I worked at, very intelligent, would often hurl this verbal weapon out at anyone delivering any kind of technical presentation. He was a very deep thinker and always had incisive insights. It was both a treat, and also terrifying to see him essentially interrogate the presenter. I only had to go before him one time, and it was both a test of one's knowledge of the material, and a measurement of one's emotional fortitude.
As for the question, the answer was almost always "No, you are missing nothing. The rest of us simply do not exist on the same level as you do".
I'm hoping when you say "interrogate the presenter" it led to some constructive collaboration and not just meaningless nitpicks or dick waving.
I'm also hoping the people you worked with could tell the difference. If not, I hope you ran away from such a place. It's rare for someone truly that much smarter than everyone else to stick around without management siloing them into more focused work.
Also, I hope you meant presentations about theoretical or engineering work and not some vague business goal. If it's the latter most of us reading this would have similarly ripped it apart (constructively), hence the need for management especially at bigger orgs. The best way to handle vague business goals is to present it to upper management and let the implementation details be filled in by their team if they agree to proceed with work.
He was very strict, valuing correctness and rigidity, but entirely well meaning. It was never about showcasing superiority, nor was it ever nitpicking. Being in the spotlight though, it could certainly feel like an attack. And in some cases it was, but it was an attack on the idea, not on the person. He was ruthless, but rarely ever wrong.
Unfortunately one person is sufficient to spoil "a place".
I am currently in this exact situation in my team. While I love everyone and really like what I do now, it became "the team vs that one guy". Which is ridiculous as he's supposed to be the pillar of the product.
So here we are, the strongest part of the team became the biggest risk.
Listening is a skill hard to master. Especially when you have no plans to try.
> Unfortunately one person is sufficient to spoil "a place".
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but it sounds like you have a lot of inexperienced people spoiling the place, not "that one guy".
> So here we are, the strongest part of the team became the biggest risk. ... he's supposed to be the pillar of the product.
The big risk is management dropping the ball not willing to coordinate your product better and depending too much on one person. If it really is such a long bridge to cross between your SME and everyone else you have to accept that the product will be as bad as the dumbest person on your team. The product has to be well understood by everyone, not just one person. You might lose your only talent here if you can't hire better people to fill in the rest of the team.
> I love everyone and really like what I do now
Not to be too harsh but this should be the lowest priority business goal. Joy at work is just one tactic to retain employees. If your people can't get acceptable work done in the first place you can't expect anyone to be happy.
How can I say this more bluntly? Don't abuse your smartest people to keep lesser people employed and happy?
> Not to be too harsh but this should be the lowest priority business goal. Joy at work is just one tactic to retain employees.
I whole heartedly disagree. Happiness is more than just about retention. It's also about efficacy of your employees. Happy employees do better work and produce more.
Paying employees more works wonders when you're making them pick up slack.
Maybe I was too subtle in implying that the path to success in such a situation is to pay the SME more and crack the whip and refuse raises on the ones dragging things down until they quit. I'm pretty sure they have been with the company too long and/or have managed to avoid work thus far only hurting themselves and the company long term. Treating them well won't do anything if they take it for granted. The next round of hires should keep these lessons in mind.
You can absolutely have a great workplace full of happy people, but you need to build that on a foundation of competence and respect. Happiness is a lot of little things done right. It's the result, not the cause.
> Happy employees do better work and produce more.
Employees who do better work and produce more are happy when they're working with peers who do the same.
One of my main poles is “how much do I give a shit about this business and the people running it”, but I never see that mentioned when people discuss employee motivation.
I’ve never worked with people whose happiness depended on productivity. It’s always been assumed that it worked the other way around.
> How can I say this more bluntly? Don't abuse your smartest people to keep lesser people employed and happy?
There is absolutely nothing in situation described by me, that fits this sentence. I'd like to explain that but you (?) already gave downvote to my comment, so it will likely just make me feel worse that I wrote a wall of text that no one will read.
I actually still agree with points you made, as a general advise.
I can't downvote replies and it's possible I projected some of my more frustrating experiences onto your situation.
If you don't have much control over hiring, company culture, etc. it wasn't directed at you, but someone definitely does.
No amount of cleverness should "earn" one the right to terrorize their coworkers.
Well there's should and there's does
I know what camp I'm in. I have engaged in discussions around a difficult problem I solved, only to have one crowd come out and explain the algorithmic simplicity.
"How would you do it?"
"Oh I don't know about that."
Always a pleasure from the armchair theorists.
Weren’t these insults honed years ago at Xerox PARC?
I'm pretty sure PARC repackaged straightforward extensions of old results of Lobachevsky.
Plagiarize, let no one else's work evade your eyes... only remember please to always call it "research".
> Plagiarize
As an ex-TA in a science program, for the love of god just cite your source if you want to paste a wall-o-text. The differences between a lit review and research are in your goals, imho.
No, they take their roots from the early years of IBM. Xerox never had anything to do with these. You are clearly misremembering something or you have no clue what you are talking about. Please take a seat and don’t speak until spoken to.
Please. The idiots at Xerox PARC were great at regurgitating the successes of Bell Labs, but their convoluted solutions revealed just how little they actually understood the elegant theory behind their clumsy missteps.
Related:
How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609492 - March 2021 (101 comments)
This article helped me understand the direction I want to go in life more than it should have.
Am I missing something here? Aren’t these ideas hashed out already 20 years ago by Tichy?
Probably the year in the title 2001
This article seems like a joke or a parody of something I lack context.
> I certainly hope faculty will take this essay to heart and sharpen their insulting skills. In the future please make all your thrusts count.
It explains how to compliment either type of computer scientist, under a sign change.
From https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/comer/
People who make these kinds of moves tend to stand out as noxious charlatans.
Having spent time in academia, this gave me a good chuckle.