That terrifying feeling when you realize the world is being run by people just muddling their way through problems one at a time and big grand plans rarely last very long.
Similar to that, I remember the feeling when I realized my parents were just normal people, they didn't know everything, they weren't right all the time, they could make mistakes, they had no fucking clue what they were doing when they had kids, but somehow they did it.
Or when you become a parent and start reading through some advice books (because I don't know anything about it) and discover that every single one has their own opinion and there is very little consensus about anything. Then you realize that the advice book authors don't really know any more than you do and are just telling you how they managed to muddle through it. Even the scientific studies in the area tend to be small or sourced from very noisy data.
And then the really terrifying feeling when you realize that the people running the world, despite all the evidence that everyone is just muddling their way through and big grand plans don't work, continue to come up with big grand plans that they insist everyone must sign up to.
Or - they have the final say-so for projects and if they don't agree people either leave or they just learn not to present innovative (read different) solutions. Once the leader leaves, the ones left are so conditioned not to engineer (innovate) the status quo eventually sinks the ship (process, company, etc.)
eh, coming from a blue-collar job Im seriously inclined to disagree. shops with questions are good shops. questions mean learning.
>there are no true adults in the room at any organization.
Im an engine mechanic by trade, and ive worked in shops with no adults. theres no OSHA "days free" sign because management is well aware that people are getting hurt and doesnt need to call attention to it. These are shops with a high percentage of "fatal 4" accidents: flying objects, swinging objects, rolling objects and lack of PPE. disability rosters are usually 3-4 people deep. guards on machines are routinely off, or if present, dangling by a bolt. your senior-most tech is a temp. Most of the people you work with can remember at least one amputation in the past year.
The absolute worst Ive seen had a mechanical maintenance tech with 3 missing fingers (crushed that year) and a manager with a bone growth stimulator on his arm from a mangling accident at a metal lathe he wasnt qualified to operate.
I think it's machismo. In a room full of people white knuckling everything, nobody wants to be the 'baby' who calls for rational behavior.
I see the same thing in white collar jobs, but the damage is harder to see. Physical and mental health rather than broken bones and lost limbs.
There's no reason everyone should have to be a hero all the fucking time. But often the only way to fix it is if everyone refuses. Not saying unionize, but if everyone slows down to a sustainable pace then what can they do about it?
Futilely reorganize your business units repeatedly until it’s a Dead Sea and there is no distinction between working hard and slacking off.
Edit: I see I cut too close to reality for some here and I want to apologize if you felt this sarcasm was off base but really I feel that my comments are indicative of reality and I am bringing something new to the conversation here.
>There's no reason everyone should have to be a hero all the fucking time. But often the only way to fix it is if everyone refuses. Not saying unionize, but if everyone slows down to a sustainable pace then what can they do about it?
Exactly what they did starting in the 70's and 80's, start shipping the jobs to someplace else. There's always somebody who is desperate. I'm not personally against trade with countries such as China, but it damn sure needs to be more accountable than it has been.
Unfortunately I don't think the way we traditionally have unions in the states enough. We need a much larger group of people to stand up and demand a better system. We might need to have unions for entire industries ala some European countries, and even that might not be enough.
It is a classic arms race, which is self-reinforcing and detrimental to all participants, but cannot be broken by local decisions.
A rational group cannot break the trend, if the psycho alpha male co-worker still wants to fight for priority (and VP status). Even a union in one company cannot enforce anything, because anything that lowers productivity will destroy the company.
Any union that has power across multiple companies ends in restrictive practices, anti-competitive behaviour, and barriers to entry to the workforce, where the psycho alpha male union boss calls the tune (mafia all over again). Then whole national industries die in the face of cut-throat international competition ...
Well, I can bet your shop's business model isn't raising hundreds of millions in capital while providing a below cost oil change service done by a team of 10 (5 of those being the CEO's buddies on administrative positions) based on the premise that one day the mechanics' labor will get automated and the company will instantly start making zillions per year.
That’s because there’s no amputation risk in white collar jobs.
There’s the risk of sinking the business by doing dumb things, but that takes a while, and many execs have made a career out of hopping from company to company, collecting giant paychecks and not sticking around long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their idiocy.
> That’s because there’s no amputation risk in white collar jobs.
In most white-collar jobs. My first white-collar job involved (among other things) probing live 270VDC circuits, overseeing tests in liquid-nitrogren-cooled chambers, and working in close proximity to live radiating antennas. Sure, I spent most of my time at my desk, but that was still ample opportunity for serious, permanent injury.
There's little amputation risk. But I nearly got my foot crushed by a 600 pound steel desk (in a box, left where it could fall) right outside my cube. Thank God the cart that had been used to move it saved me, literally by an inch.
I'm not clear how the cart saved you? How did the box fall, what objects were where, what was your relative position? I'm just trying to recreate what happened in my head and not getting there.
The box got unloaded off the cart outside my cube. It got left standing on edge, which is not how one should leave 600 pounds of steel. (This was a kit, not an assembled desk, so "on edge" was maybe eight inches wide.) When it fell, the cardboard box caught the cart, but none of the steel inside did. The steel then proceeded to slowly rip the box.
The net result was that this 600 pounds got slowly put on my foot, rather than slamming onto it. That was the difference between minutes of pain and months of rehab.
(And, yeah, it falling may or may not have been my fault...)
Setting off a not-clearly-marked death-trap outside of what should be a safe space is not something I'd classify as "your fault"... at least not with the provided data.
If part of the box remained on the cart, then there's an air gap, and that might put you into broken or bruised bone territory instead of crushing damage.
So someone dropped a 600 pound box so close to a worker the only thing that saved him is the vertical air gap provided by the cart? I thought he meant the box fell an inch next to his foot, not above it.
I agree with the content of this article, but disagree with the central metaphor. "Adults in the room" is used to indicate a responsible person who stops malfeasance right? I think it's just a matter of once you start work you realize it's not schoolwork, not only are the solutions never clear, the problems are never clear either.
Rather than seeing it as an actual claim about adults, see it is a representation of someone's mental model that there will always be people who are like adults are to a child.
In fact, when you get a job, you are now an adult in the room, so you better act like it. It's one of the many ideas that when you bring it up to the conscious level it's drop-dead obvious, but the idea that there will be other responsible people can lurk in the lower parts of your mind for a long time, and it can take a lot of time to clear the idea out. Thinking about it consciously is unfortunately not a full solution to that problem, but it certainly can be a huge help.
It's the same sort of thing as imposter syndrome; it's not that you're literally an imposter, in fact many sufferers of imposter syndrome may well be above average, it's a statement about internal perceptions.
When I first entered the workforce I remember someone pulling me to the side and used this exact metaphore. Told me there were adults and children and I needed to start treating certain people as adults rather than equals (more or less, I'm paraphrasing, but this was the meaning).
I was blown away that anyone actually had that attitude toward others. I was probably 21 I think?
I mean, I get it on one level with respect to politics, but screw that.
> not only are the solutions never clear, the problems are never clear either.
I can see both sides of this. I've been in situations where, when multiple options are presented, the groupthink is "well... there's no easy answers". To the extent that there's no one 'perfect' option, yes, but there are definitely some demonstrably/qualitatively bad options. But without some agreement that some people in the room do have the experience to make some judgements, decisions are left to 'populate vote'.
The other issue I've seen is that people just look for "solution X" and are unprepared to deal with the new questions/problems that arise from now having essentially a new business landscape.
20 years ago, I helped a company move from paper order forms (taking weeks to process) to electronic - a month's orders from hundreds of reps from around the country were entered, correctly, in 10 hours. Literally overnight, it changed their entire business, in terms of predictions, materials ordering, shipping/logistics - all of the previous processes were now up for rethinking and rebuilding. The shift happened so fast - this was, essentially a skunkworks projects - that it created a lot of internal political upheaval few were prepared for.
The core I was getting at is even when problems are clear and solved, the solution will often bring about new 'problems'.
Businesses cannot afford to be wishy washy, there are long term infrastructure and process investments that must be made - there are different ways they can be made but you need to grok the costs and benefits to appropriately make or reverse those decisions without exposing your business to ruin.
Yes, I'd previously thought "no adults in the room" was an idiom with a couple particular meanings (one of them related to the idiom of "adult supervision").
This article is changing a familiar meaning, or speaking in a more limited way (though for a constructive and worthwhile message).
It's true that people in organizations don't have all the answers, and you also shouldn't expect to have all your ducks lined up for you anymore.
But the article could also encourage the naive idea that the organization doesn't know anything, and that everyone is totally fumbling along.
We currently have dotcom employers who want cheap and impressionable labor, encouraging the idea that experience is useless (e.g., big dotcom CEO proclaiming they only want to hire 20yos), and the article doesn't help counteract that big-corporate messaging.
In reality, unless you're at a startup of only 20yos, you'll have battle-scarred people who've seen some mistakes before, and who'll be able to recognize and avoid a lot of similar mistakes in the future. And hopefully they'll try to pass on some of that experience the easier way, to those listening, and through good practices.
There is some poetic justice, though, to the cyclic nature: we go from being a new developer who overestimates themselves and underestimates everyone else, to being an experienced developer (who has finally grown to be half as smart as we initially assumed we were)... and we get ignored/dissed by the new-grad hires. :)
Of course, the more-experienced people don't know near everything. They avoid some mistakes they've seen before, and are maybe more likely to recognize when they're staring at a potential new mistake... but, to some degree, they're winging it, like the article said.
I wouldn't even say "stop malfeasance". The idea (I am the author) is that the business world is full of people who don't know exactly what is going on. That is due to the fact that, compared to school, business in general is dynamic. And I think the technology business is more dynamic than most other sectors.
When I was a new developer (the topic of that entire blog is advice to new developers) that was a surprise.
> not only are the solutions never clear, the problems are never clear either.
>If you go into a company expecting to be handed work on a platter and to have someone know exactly what is going on, the way that, say, a college professor knows how to teach physics 101, you are going to be disappointed. It’s much more likely that the folks who are senior to you are trying to stay one step ahead of the customer.
I had a "non traditional" education.
I was a great High School student, but once I was in college I struggled, mostly due to non educational issues (poor reading comprehension, depression, general issues I think would be termed ADHD) and I dropped out. I managed to work my way into the tech industry with luck and just making stuff work. The fact that I didn't and wasn't going to know what to do I chalked up to my own reading comprehension and other issues. So I just accepted it and kept "moving forward".
Meanwhile a lot of friend continued on through college being very successful and accomplishing a lot and then... really struggling when the working world wasn't fair, and perhaps most importantly didn't provide a prescribed path to high fives, good grades and knowing they were doing it right and would get good outcomes.
So I'm often working with CS grads and I see the same thing from some of them, folks struggling when they're not told what to do, how, and confidant in their own actions.
Education seems to provide a lot of specific environments that just don't exist outside that and it tends to be a bump in the road for a lot of people.
Sounds like the difference between me and an acquaintance of mine. I went into software development with a burning passion for it. Nobody was going to stop me from doing it. He on the other hand went into it because it was considered a good career path and you could make a lot of money.
He rushed through college and graduated quickly with good grades (< 4 years if I remember correctly). I putzed around, had bad habits, muddled my way through every course, got 90% through my degree and said "fuck it, I can't do this school thing anymore" in my 5th year and got a job.
I never finished my degree, but he languished while I excelled in my career. He's at least as smart if not smarter than me.
What I did do is co-op (work for a semester, and then take classes for a semester). I wrote my own software. I created my own websites. I built and managed a primitive social network for my gaming buddies. I took a generic job at a no-name mortgage company for very little pay and worked my way up. He didn't do any of these things. He got out into the real world expecting things to be handed to him, and it never happened. He never did the work-work, just the school-work.
I don't know how else to account for it, we went to the same schools. I simply didn't learn the same lessons he learned. Most of what I still build on to this day was the more practical in the field work from the bottom up and fight for it experience. His was from schooling.
Great comment, I absolutely agree. I learned to code largely through problem sets, HIGHLY defined, clear issues with pre-cleaned (!!!) data. Once I'm out coding in the wild, I am the one creating the dataset, it's highly messy in its infancy, and most of my collaborators are in flux about what they want, how they want it, and which subgroup and sample they want to examine. The name of the game seems to be quick iteration and fast communication loops.
Just naming stuff, you'd think that would be obvious and easy and then things change and: "Why the hell did I name it that?" is a common thing I think.
Good education should teach fundamental principles and theories that apply to every real world scenario within a domain. Unfortunately the push for "real world" education seems to have won in a lot of places. So you get people educated in how to solve very specific problems and are completely lost when any of the parameters are changed.
I wish I could speak intelligently about it because honestly I'm jealous of all the CS grads ;)
Personally, don't think it would take a great deal of adjustment to really improve the structured educational setup that would provide specific curriculum ... but also more open ended experiences.
It could be less about them being CS grads per se and more about their age and relative experience in the world. I'm a CS grad who originally dropped out and screwed around for a few years, but in the end came back to it. In fact, while researching at the graduate level, I realized then that even professors and advisors aren't necessarily going to teach you everything you need to know or set you on a course, it's your job to extract their knowledge and find the answers to the questions you come up with. I also worked all through high school and college. I think my experience sets me up for disappointment in the workforce because I know how to get things done and see what's important, and often I feel like the only adult in the room with a bunch of kids who don't want to listen and who don't know how to really chug through long-term challenges while minding short-term issues.
At one point I did a bootcamp as part of a career change.
Some folks who completed it with me went on to work on a CS degree as well.
We talk a lot and many of them think a bootcamp like experience before a CS degree would be a good idea. A sort of fast paced, intense, and "ok now it is time for you to hit the internet and figure out steps 7 through 10" might be a good place to start for a lot of them.
But more specifically to your point working with people is so important. I did some customer service years ago, and I find myself using that all the time, no job asks for it, but when talking to customers (and people who talk to customers) it is indispensable.
That's a fantastic idea, and I haven't really heard of people who do bootcamp then CS. It would serve as a good motivator and also a way to weed out the people who really have no idea what they're getting into (as long as some good expectations can be set during the bootcamp).
Several people in my program wanted to do fun stuff like work with video games, which is totally fine! But they were not prepared for the not-so-fun linear algebra, Unix gruntwork, UML modeling and algorithm analysis involved in the course study. Sadly some people washed out, others cheated their way through it (neither of which is exclusive to CS students, to be sure). Seems like doing bootcamp first would give them a chance to decide not to go with CS and just start their career from there, or do something else altogether. Or like your cohort, discover that they just want to know more.
And yeah, nothing taught me how to work with people like working for tips–your livelihood literally depends on your figuring out how to make them happy! Or at least making them think they're happy :)
The downside being that CS and bootcamps are similar topics but diverge in important ways. There's limited math in bootcamps and etc... but at the same time it would give them exposure to "You're gonna be working stuff out that you haven't been told ... and you have to go figure it out without hand holding."
Maybe the most surprising thing for me is that it is not only true at the entry level, but this is always true the higher you meet people in the hierarchy. Somehow I expected leaders to master their subjects, have grand long term visions or perfectly know the market/domain.
From what I can see, most people are trying to do their best but being a staff principal senior engineer does not necessarily you can answer everything (but usually they know who to ask or what to do to get an anwser)
It is not that people are incompetent, but you can't be an expert at everything.
I know this is meant to show some level of not knowing stuff being somehow correlated to a rise in level, but couldn't it be an example of successful use of abstraction. For example, if a manager leads a group of 5 people with diverse expertise, you would need that manager to know 5x as many things as each employee if they're really expected to be as deep as each. It seems that it would be hard to find such people. A more accomplishable strategy would be to learn who knows what and what are the top level fundamentals of each field so that the right questions can be asked.
The higher someone is the less overall they know. I know regulars that I would put way higher than some of our experts. And its not only technical knowledge but also problem solving, attitude and craftsmanship.
Thats what happens when promotions are given based on "years worked" or "office politics" instead of work excellence.
Assuming that people start from the bottom, are you saying that their skills dull over time, or they never had them in the first place?
I'd suggest their skillset changes as they grow into their new role. As they transition from writing code to people wrangling, the code skills stop being important and new ones take their place. Same with attitude, they have to transition to a new focus.
This reminds me of The Peter Principle, which basically says that people will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. Not to say that that are incompetent people, per se, but that if they are doing well in their current position, they will get promoted. They will continue to get promoted until they land in a position that is just a little out of their league, and that's where they'll stay. Eventually, an org is filled with people who are just a little over-their-head in almost every position.
The Peter Principle implies that the higher in the hierarchy you go the more difficult your duties are.
My take is that engineers between like 4 and 15 years experience and are not managers of some sort have the hardest duties. As a novice you get help or are not handed the really hard tasks and as senior you talk about the hard tasks or do some pre-study and leave the implementation as a exercise to someone else.
Promotions are more about having a ticket away from hard engineering tasks than engineering competence.
> It is not that people are incompetent, but you can't be an expert at everything.
Agree 100%.
I tell people who are speaking for the first time that it is likely they are among the top 1-3 experts in the room on their subject (unless it is super basic). This is because knowledge is so vast, and, in the tech industry, so ephemeral. (Some kinds of knowledge aren't ephemeral, but many kinds are subject to rapid evolution.)
> From what I can see, most people are trying to do their best but being a staff principal senior engineer does not necessarily [mean] you can answer everything
Yet this industry interviews them like they are expected to.
I can't count the number of people I worked with who sold me their dev team as the universal weapon for software engineering. Just to see them cobble together a solution on outdated tech that they didn't even understand half as good as they said.
I think we should be more humble. Which is hard, because everyone wants to be seen as valuable.
You can be humble and valuable at the same time. When hubris creeps in that's when things become problematic - not just for that person or team but for the entire company. One thing that I was thankful to learn early on was to assume that everyone else (in the organization) knows things you don't.
So this is the result of what I call "technical democracy".
Or consensus driven management. The adults are there, but their opinion is mixed with everyone else.
This is the symptom of an industry that do not value experience and even oppose it.
But some rooms definitely have more clowns. Don't mistake the message of "nobody knows everything" for "nobody has to know anything".
There are places and teams that do have competent, experienced people that know how to solve tricky problems, and there are also teams where too many key people basically don't know anything and attempt to silence the voices of anyone who have experience and expertise from making them look dumb.
In some places "everyone is trying their best" to solve tough problems, in other places "everyone is trying their best" to get promoted. These two orgs are not the same.
Regarding the parent issue and disregarding companies for a moment.
Not sure what you mean exactly by having no clue. You mean things like the family finances / jobs / schools stuff or parenting rules or what to do with illnesses and stuff like that?
Because I think saying nobody has a clue is a bit harsh. Some people are indeed more organized and have a better grasp on their plans and outlooks. I wouldn't say my parents had "no clue" or could have afforded to have no clue about what was going on.
I often hear this and it's probably meant as some sort of encouragement or anti-impostor syndrome talk, but it can also backfire. There is indeed value in thinking about how your family is faring, whether the finances are working out, whether you should move for a better job. It would be foolish to say nobody has any clue, so doing anything without thinking about it will be just as good.
> So yeah, no different with what we do, since we're literally always building new things that haven't been done before.
"Where do people get the confidence to say that their work is so uniquely novel that it's "something that has never been done before in the history of the universe", that the field is obviously totally different from another field they know nothing about, etc. ?"
--Dan Luu
I think it is less that these things "have never been done before" and more "we haven't bothered to learn anything from people who've done things like this before". Same with parenting.
It's the same as with parenting - you can't really learn these things from people who've done this before, you have to learn them by doing it yourself. A large portion of potential parents put in a lot of effort to read up and learn stuff before their first child, but that's really nothing compared to what they can learn from actual experience; when rising your second/third/etc child, everything you'll use will be from the actual experience with previous children and just a minority of useful things will come from the initial vague guidance of others.
I had a friend who was super excited to have his second child, because he'd be able to reuse the knowledge he had picked up with the first one. Then he discovered that his kids were polar opposites - he had to start over from square one.
That too, but also combined with having to balance that the people who did this before also did it in a different time with different resources and also have selective memories.
I’ve found that while the majority of people are trying to stay one step ahead, there are always those that feel they do know what’s going on completely. However, because they think they’re in the know, it’s very often that their opinions are scripture and it’s impossible to change their mind on anything. If you’re a new developer, this problem is exacerbated by the “I am a principal engineer, you’re an associate so I’m correct.”
I'm not talking about running full tilt 24/7; I'm just saying don't be that guy that gets assigned a ticket, makes a comment on the ticket for clarification, and then spends the next four hours doing god-knows-what instead of reaching out and unblocking yourself.
Figuring this out really blew my mind. All of these giant corporations from Apple to Chevy to Starbucks are just a bunch of people trying to figure stuff out. When I was younger, even in college, I really thought of companies as these perfectly organized machines with flawless processes that allow for continual success. Now I realize it's a bunch of normal humans doing their jobs while they deal with the other shit in their lives too.
Putting that together really helped give me the push to start my own business... if founders are just people with an idea who do work to make a company, I can be a founder.
I very much agree with this, especially the point on hubris. What I'm really looking for is advice on dealing on people in more senior positions that don't get this.
Being mostly self-taught, I often feel like I don't have any ammunition "against" the more academic folks, and it makes it difficult to maintain an open/curious mindset. What do I need to prove to stop the constant attempts to gaslight me? I strive to be a team player, but the amount of condescension is maddening sometimes.
1) Focus more on assisting your peers with their work. This doesn’t mean telling them what to do, but look for people who are struggling to keep their head above water on work that you know how to do well, and help them out of that place.
2) Let people win. Not when it’s important to you, but know when you’re in the “I’m right but this isn’t going to sink our project” place and let them have those wins. It will help take their “make sure that one stays in line” radar off you. Bonus points if you can make them feel like you learned something from them.
3) Quit. I don’t mean right away, but if you’re not generally enjoying your workplace, for ANY reason, or even for NO reason—quit. Some of this is basically like dating. When you don’t like someone, you just keep looking. There are more fish in the sea, as they say.
4) Remember that disagreements are fundamental to collaboration. There simply isn’t time to reach consensus on everything, even in a zero asshole environment. So teams are built on sparse networks of trust. There are likely a very small number of bottom lines that hold the org together. Everything else is a “nice to have”. Keep that in mind, and if you want to feel valued at a high level, you’re going to need to figure out what those bottom lines are, who is trusting who to watch them, and how you can help them long enough to become part of that trust network.
5) I heard a quote recently that I’ve been thinking a lot... Paraphrasing: “The master doesn’t convince anyone she knows the right way. She just works, and her work is flawless.” Just something to think about when you’ve got an assignment that doesn’t quite match what you think the ultimate strategic goal should be. You can still execute at a high level and feel good about that.
Hey thanks for this response. I'll have to work on #2 - I suppose I need to search for more opportunities to ask them for advice, maybe it will help build a bridge. Difficult to get past the initial dismissiveness, though. I'm not ready to quit but that is a good reminder too. I'm actually incredibly happy with the role (besides not feeling like everyone is 100% on board, anyways). #4 is a great reminder as well (and while we're butchering quotes - "tension on a string can create majestic music" :) ). Really appreciate the stoic point of view of that quote in #5, too.
While I 100% acknowledge that senior employees / academic folks can be as dogmatic and stubborn as anyone, the phrase "the constant attempts to gaslight me" throws up some flags. It sounds more than a little paranoid.
What is their behavior? Are there any more-charitable explanations for their behavior?
It's fine to doubt and to question - that's how we learn - but they may have experience and competence that you're discounting. I hope you're lucky and work with seniors who can give honest answers, like "we've always done it this way, we're not sure it's optimal" when appropriate, and good explanations otherwise.
One instance that sticks out- had a private discussion over IM with one guy which essentially ended up as "yah, I'm aware of that problem and we're cutting that corner now for brevity, bossman is aware too. I've thought about it already and actually do have the code ready to do the right thing and it'll be implemented when the time is right." To me, just another minor detail (a detail that is not particularly in the purview of this engineer's projects. Once upon a time he may have been in a similar role (not exactly) and believes he has authority because of it). In a later, in-person all-hands meeting, he brought it up in a way that made it seem like it was a critical, urgent mistake that needs to be corrected ASAP. Why wouldn't he have expressed that 1:1 when we were actually talking about it? From what I can tell, he just wanted to make me look like a fool instead of suggesting a solution. Yah it's makes me paranoid, I'd rather just keep my mouth shut than give him something else to put on his list of transgressions to bring up whenever he wants to throw me under a bus.
1. The general point this essay is making is correct.
2. I do not think the expression "adults in the room" is meant to describe omniscient individuals, I believe it refers to the quality of judgment and motivation people have.
I believe adults and uncertainty are orthogonal.
3. The general point this essay is making is correct.
This is cute. This article is itself an example of no adult in the room - the author skips over the real causes workplaces are full of mediocrity and goes for the politically correct never-offend-anybody stance of 'nobody knows eeeeverything, right?'
Workplaces are full of people who are not good at their job, only think about their bottom line and will resist anyone threatening their safety by trying to 'help' as the author suggests.
I'm looking forward to a blog post on how to navigate office politics, because that is the most important skillset of working at any large corporation, as soon as you have a mediocre skillset that isn't obviously mediocre to the manager caste.
Where you see mediocrity and people not being good at their jobs, the author sees that "... no one knows everything and everyone is doing the best they can.".
> goes for the politically correct never-offend-anybody stance of 'nobody knows eeeeverything, right?'
I feel like you may have unreasonable expectations - everyone starts out with a mediocre skillset. Do you expect everyone to be experts? Or are you simply frustrated with the corporate ladder?
The proper response to mediocre skillsets is to do the work to improve skillsets. Whatever else is meant by "adults", one would hope they're helping that process.
Your post brazenly reflects my experience at Amazon for a year.
Specifically, using "workplace principles" (actually look these up if you want a quick laugh) to cover for the mistakes of tech managers and/or when junior devs didn't deliver 100% with almost zero guidance or backing.
So, the basic idea that no one in most adult organizations knows as much as a teacher who has taught that exact same curriculum several times before, is true and relevant.
What is not brought out much is, well if you cannot use the standard of knowledge and competence that school and childhood taught you to expect, what should you expect? The one-sentence answer is too vague to really serve as a useful guideline.
My wife, when working one of her first jobs, had a boss who was such a crack addict that she cleaned out the cash register of her own business every night, forcing my wife to ask the first several customers of the day for exact change. This, is not just not perfect, it's not ok, and you would want to quit any job where the boss is like that. But, she didn't have enough experience yet to know what was the actual, real-world level of expectation you should have for how together the people in charge should be.
Perhaps I am expecting too much from one article, but it mostly seems to say (properly): "don't expect the same standard of knowledge and competence that your childhoold trained you to expect", without saying much about what to put in its place.
I've often thought.. If you feel like everything is under control you clearly don't know what's going on. It seems the higher I go in a company the more this is true.
When I was a junior being handed design or detailed work specs it seemed like part of an over-arching grand plan. Now I realize.. we just hang on and try to stay alive; albeit with-in something resembling a meta-narrative.
I think an important aspect to this that maybe hasn't been mentioned is how important it is to understand what your values are - more specifically, what your boundaries both personally and professionally are.
Sometimes, regardless of age or experience, you have to decide when you should step up as the "adult" in the room and either leave or call something out as crossing a personal / professional ethical boundary.
Big tech co's and startups try to word HR legalese and cultural "principles" to subvert and minimize the affect of personal boundaries and expression.
If you want to learn about a company's workplace health, ask what they define "honesty" as, from the standpoint of a founder and that of a new college grad / employee working for them.
This isn't a new idea to me either. I would have put it in words "The attic of the org-chart is empty" but same point.
But what bewilders me is that there ARE achievements in the world that you have to wonder how they succeeded. The engineers and scientists of NASA put men on the moon without email and mostly paper based information sharing systems. You can't just muddle your way though such efforts - how did that mission succeed? It is REALLY the case that a handful of "more aware than most" individuals had a such a strong direction providing influence on their peers (or subordinates - or superiors even) that made such an achievement possible? It seems like stretch to me.
How did they do it, if most of them were just muddling their way through?
It’s a funny title for this idea. When starting your career, I think it’s much more productive to think “ok I’m an adult now” rather than “there are no adults in the room”. Maybe we’re saying the same thing, but it’s a mental shift.
I share the same experience. Rarely is there one colleague or superior who completely groks the problem space. But is this not what you get when you move fast and break things?
Absolute freedom is terrifying: you could do anything, who knows what to do, who knows if it will work?
It’s much more comforting to focus on things like clean code, anything you can devise a set of rules for and read a big book about and then action the advice in the book. See, best practices say we should do this.
If you've realized this, you are one of the adults in the room.