What’s funny to me is how many incompetent “thinkers” appear in meetings. Obviously, thought (even removed from implementation entirely) often has immense value. Eg, many people spent a lot of time thinking about arithmetic, linear algebra, floating point, compilers, and now I can go run whatever cool algorithm on my computer. But I continually seem to run into these people who seem borderline incompetent at anything but spewing out whatever pops into their head. Half is nonsense, one-quarter would be actively destructive if you tried to implement it, they always seem to know everything about everything but whenever it’s something you know really well you can tell that they are very confused, etc. when I meet these people now I just think “oh, you’re one of those guys who is good at saying a lot of things” and then move on. Oh well
I once worked with a "Data Scientist" at a hedge fund that was clearly pattern matching whatever problem you had to some random Apache/Google tool without actually listening to the problem.
His data science recommendations looked like a markov chain of various analysis algorithms.
One time I started digging into his recommendation trying to figure out why it was even on topic and he starts going on about how he's a "big picture" guy and not to bother him with implementation details. The thing was, his 'big picture' ETL was breaking our trading system every other week due to some inane dependency strictness that wasn't necessary.
There's nothing more 'big picture' than not fucking trading!
I guess because portfolio managers aren't specialized in engineering, we see a lot more of these fakers in finance than tech.
Talking is easy, executing is hard. Executing requires discipline which so many people seem to lack.
One of the reasons I love making people write down their idea (myself included) before talking about it is that writing forces a small initial execution step. Even a step this small can often filter the useless ideas away.
This is where design doc should be required. At my company we engineers are required to come up with a design doc and share with the whole org for feedback then a design meeting that takes place every week. At first I thought this was a step back because I felt it was a water fall but after writing my own design doc I quickly realized “talking is really fucking cheap.” Sitting down and write a doc that considers as many corner cases and implementation really produce high quality work. It’s all about discipline indeed.
"At my company we engineers are required to come up with a design doc and share with the whole org for feedback then a design meeting that takes place every week."
Wow, true system engineering! Your company sounds like a good place to do some professional work.
That's great. A design doc is even a step beyond just writing down the idea. Bezos is famous for making people write one pagers to pass out prior to talking about any idea. I see one pagers as way to quickly weed through a bunch of ideas, and a design doc as the next step to determine feasibility.
You see that a lot with 2e people -- bright people with some weaknesses or a disability. That could account for how negatively you have experienced this. Many 2e people have never really been taught good ways to handle the combination of big strengths and big weaknesses.
I serve as a sounding board a lot for my oldest son and that works well, but it's not uncommon for such people to just be trying to meet their own need to process information and/or feed their ego, oblivious to how it impacts other people and not really welcoming of the feedback they really need for this to be constructive. A good sounding board doesn't just listen, they ask pertinent questions and make insightful comments that help move the thought process along.
Sometimes when I meet people like that, I'm able to direct the conversation to a more constructive back and forth of that sort. But some people just know they have this need to talk, they have a lot of baggage that makes them openly hostile to meaningful feedback and they crave validation. Anything other than praising their half-baked ideas is met with toxic reactions. In such cases, the best you may be able to do is basically make a few polite noises and then disengage as quickly as possible.
> they have a lot of baggage that makes them openly hostile to meaningful feedback and they crave validation. Anything other than praising their half-baked ideas is met with toxic reactions. In such cases, the best you may be able to do is basically make a few polite noises and then disengage as quickly as possible.
would serve pretty well as a fair description of normal people, ime.
True, almost everyone has baggage. I think the difference is one of scale.
For example, in grade 5 I got a C+ in fine arts. It devastated me to the point where I questioned my abilities and disengaged from schooling. Permanently. It's only been in the last few years that I've actually been able to apply myself to anything.
Now, I can see that was an unreasonable reaction. At the time though, I didn't even understand what was happening.
If I hadn't got a lot of help, I believe I would still be driven by my insecurities to this day and would be impossible to work with.
Yes, those are talkers masquerading as thinkers. Not all talkers are bad, in fact some are great to work with, but the bad ones seem unable to not burn bridges.
> What’s funny to me is how many incompetent “thinkers” appear in meetings.
My thought as well. I also worked in hedge funds for a long time, and I kept getting resistance from the self-proclaimed "thinkers" to do even the most basic project management things like keeping a shared list of bugs, using version control, etc. It became clear that they simply didn't know how to use these tools, while claiming to specialize in financial modelling.
This also turned out to be false, as moving on to other funds I discovered their way of seeing things was quite limited. Which I had a good suspicion of, but other people actually showed me how one could approach things.
Part of that reckoning was that to be good at building financial strategies -something virtually nobody will tell you about- you need to be fairly good with writing code. Not just your Frankenstein of VBA, Excel, and Matlab, but including a fairly deep understanding of algorithms as well as common DevOps tools.
