Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer (2012)

https://a16z.com/2012/08/09/rehabilitating-the-arrogant-engineer/

by dsr12 • 8 years ago

68 80 8 years ago

myWindoonn2• 8 years ago

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

eropple2• 8 years ago

Engineer says that arrogant jerks should be less arrogant and more decent towards their fellow human beings.

What's your dismissive line this time?

jadedhacker• 8 years ago

That's always true, the context matters a lot. The actual factors that characterize "arrogant" behavior are relevant to the discussion.

zwieback• 8 years ago

That's what you got out of reading the post? I didn't think the suggestion that teamwork is important would be controversial in any way.

typomatic• 8 years ago

The post isn't about "Teamwork is important". The title is about "the arrogant engineer". You've elided the thing that made someone angry and then questioned them why they're angry about it. This is not good argumentation.

ThorinJacobs2• 8 years ago

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

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

myWindoonn2• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

wolfgke6• 8 years ago

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

Being arrogant and being perceived by other people as arrogant are two completely unrelated pairs of shoes.

I personally would assume that many "nerds", for a lack of "social fluency" (I want to avoid the term "social skills", since in my experience they are not socially "unskilled", but rather think differently from many other people, which makes them often act somewhat clumsily), are perceived as arrogant, while they actually are not. On the other hand, I observe that many people who play the "acting humbly" game are actually deep inside quite arrogant and narcistic.

mfringel• 8 years ago

I'm not shy about calling people out on self-serving narratives. If that article pointed at "startups should be more pliant to VC narratives", I'd be throwing down the rhetorical penalty flag, calling Projection on the offense, and telling them to try again.

That all being said... it appears that you're assuming facts not in evidence.

ljw1001• 8 years ago

I'm gonna have to go out on a limb and say that OP would need some evidence to convince me that engineers are more arrogant than VC. As opposed to no evidence at all.

This, after all, is a guy who works for pmarca, who, having achieved the status of "rich white person", went on to posit in public that the end of colonialism was bad for India: "Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades." It's possible there were some nuances he was missing.

slededit2• 8 years ago

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

HumanDrivenDev2• 8 years ago

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

satori99• 8 years ago

You have watched it enough to get annoyed by it? I saw part of an episode once, and I thought it was a program for children.

misnome• 8 years ago

...what? I mean, maybe some theoretical physicists spend all day doing maths and not simulating it, but almost all the physicists I know spend large amounts of time writing software; anything experimental or observational tends to produce large volumes of data with extremely bespoke analysis, and anything non-experimental probably involves lots of simulations.

People usually have a shock when they start their PhD and find they have to learn to program, fast.

Aloha3• 8 years ago

Physicists and Mechanical engineers, often do write software.

So do a whole host of other people.

duxup3• 8 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. I don't think you'd score points in the office relating to engineers with a "Hey I watch Big Bang Theory!".

blank stares

I once had an HR team give a talk to a bunch of engineers. They opened up with "Who watched Judging Amy last night?"

It did not go well after that, in fact it was a horrific couple days of "training" where everything went wrong communication wise, for a lot of reasons ... one dude effectively ended his time at the company on one of the first days when he got into an argument with HR. (Granted that wasn't Judging Amy's fault).

tiles• 8 years ago

I have to say though, Judging Amy was such a solid 2000's drama.

pdimitar7• 8 years ago

I pity the people who judge scientists and engineers by watching TBBT (and there are many of them). Only watched the pilot and could barely force myself to finish it. It was extremely cringe-worthy.

tptacek• 8 years ago

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

crististm• 8 years ago

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

pdimitar7• 8 years ago

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

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

duxup3• 8 years ago

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

SirensOfTitan• 8 years ago

I wonder who the target audience here is. It is a short article composed of quotes from Randy Pausch, some generalizations about engineers, and sports metaphors.

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

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

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

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

justicezyx• 8 years ago

Given that engineers are usually the one who do not talk about running a business, then it pretty much leave them as the only target of being arrogant, because they are not going to pin another group of people as arrogant...

ISL• 8 years ago

The caricatures on Big-Bang theory have some basis in truth, but are generally unlike the physicists I work with every day.

skookumchuck5• 8 years ago

I don't know any engineers who are obsessed with comic books, Star Trek, or Frodo.

s-shellfish5• 8 years ago

There are lots of experiences that are very specific to technical people.

These experiences are not easily communicated.

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

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

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

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

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

commandlinefan• 8 years ago

winds up looking like arrogance

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

s73v3r_3• 8 years ago

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

Far too often, "lack of social skills" is used as an excuse for being a jerk, and refusing to think about what their words and their actions.

archagon• 8 years ago

Perhaps I'm not the deepest programmer in the world, but I really can't relate to much of this at all. To me, there's no contradiction in being a technical person and acting in a pleasant manner to the people around me.

(Maybe it's a matter of perspective. I enjoy programming, but I mostly view it as a tool for improving people-things: making art, solving problems, expanding human potential. The human elements must always be at the forefront, and the machine is just not something I care very much about, except as a means to an end.)

CompelTechnic• 8 years ago

I've got a pet theory.

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

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

gnarbarian• 8 years ago

It's because a lot of us are nerds. Also, more socially adept engineers tend to end up in leadership positions.

eropple2• 8 years ago

Thing is, though--especially as time's gone on--more and more engineers I meet, completely and totally qualified people, are not bad at social skills. Many are quite engaging and charming people. And many who were socially deficient have gotten better over time when they've worked on it, myself included, with no matching decline in their ability to address that so-heavy "weight of technical decision."

So I don't think "our big brains are so busy" is a great excuse, even were it a reason (and I don't think it is).

westoncb• 8 years ago

Another anecdote in the opposite direction: I've had good social skills, made friends with diverse groups of people easily, etc. all my life. When I was working in a grocery store in my mid-twenties, I was a typical person to call on when there was a customer who needed to be placated.

I spent my years 17 - 20 doing little aside from programming. I went from having written two little things in VB to writing games and game engines, emulators, 3D model loaders etc. Whenever I was on a bus I was probably reading Real-time Rendering or the OpenGL Superbible.

I had no social difficulties at that time. And soon after I quit programming because my wrist were bothering me, and I fairly easily made a new group of friends who I started hanging out with (non-nerdy friends with no technical backgrounds or interests).

BUT, by the time I was ~27, after spending about 2 years working obsessively on a software project (it was a new way of writing code that could make it efficient to do without mouse/keyboard)—I could recognize in myself the characteristics of a more stereotypical social-skill lacking engineer: difficulty making eye contact, excessive tension, generally fumbling/passive in social interactions.

Eventually I got out of it, but my understanding of what happened was similar to what the GP posted: I always had that project on my mind. I would get deep insights about it out of the blue, and if I was working (grocery store) or watching a movie or hanging out with friends, I was still trying out different ideas related to it.

When you don't leave that abstract/analytical mind state, you can't really connect with people, and you end up approaching things with a similar conscious problem-solving mind set, which is just not effective for so many aspects of human interaction. There's also some difficulty from how other people perceive you when you're interacting with them while in that state of mind.

And there's almost certainly some connection to anxiety here: anxiety is a feeling of needing to change your situation; at its core, rational thought is our means of detaching from current happenings to form a plan for an alternate course of action. I think that if you're always thinking, you're always at least a bit anxious as well, which makes you something like more fragile in social interactions.

rimliu• 8 years ago

There is also a possibility that defintion of "good social skills" differs.

mjw1007• 8 years ago

I think that's true.

For example, I think "remembering what you have agreed to do" is a rather important social skill, and I don't think it's one where engineers are by any means below average.

hinkley3• 8 years ago

Trauma surgeons aren't exactly known for their bubbly personalities either.

But I get pretty tired of being a trauma surgeon. I think I'd rather be more like a PT.

pygy_2• 8 years ago

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

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

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

wolfgke6• 8 years ago

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

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

fjsolwmv• 8 years ago

That only makes sense if they lost some social skills they had earlier, which seems unlikely.

It also doesn't explain how salespeople can socialize while thinking, or why engineers don't suddenly improve social skills at night and weekend.

pdimitar7• 8 years ago

There are likely no small number of people who are like that but...

(1) As a sibling comment said, many engineers are quite confident and charming, men and women -- and you cannot determine they are engineers even if you talk for hours on end with them, without them sharing their occupation. Many people told me the latter about me post-factum as well. I simply don't tout it even though I feel it gives me more credentials to talk on certain topics. But I still prefer to invite discussion by expressing healthy skepticism instead of arrogantly claiming that I am the authority on the topic.

(2) Those who have trouble socializing usually have a teenage trauma of some sort. I legitimately only met 2 programmers in my entire life who looked and sounded truly malevolent; 99.99% of all engineers I've ever met were normal human beings struggling to overcome their limitations.

Felz• 8 years ago

Beware the fundamental attribution error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

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

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

s73v3r_3• 8 years ago

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

Animats2• 8 years ago

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

BadThink6655321• 8 years ago

Not according to my taste in beer, black coffee and gin and tonic (https://www.popsci.com/psychopaths-may-prefer-bitter-foods)

skookumchuck5• 8 years ago

while that's common in top management

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

Animats2• 8 years ago

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

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-dis... [2] https://www.cio.com.au/article/537320/how_recognise_deal_wor...

imajes• 8 years ago

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

AndrewKemendo• 8 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hinkley3• 8 years ago

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

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

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

SketchySeaBeast• 8 years ago

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

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

skookumchuck5• 8 years ago

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

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

wolfgke6• 8 years ago

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

Example from psycholoy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old...

By the way, the statements in the

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnum_effect&old...

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

sanj• 8 years ago

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

hinkley3• 8 years ago

A little OT, but:

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

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

Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer (2012)

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