So far 3 out of 5 items in the list have been called into question. Seems like an entire domain of knowledge might be a bit too broad to be summarized into listicles, even with the caveat that they are "rules of thumb".
I think people like the idea of democracy more than they like actual democracy. On some level, most people would agree that pure democracy as in one person one vote in every organization is ridiculous. Any organization of sufficient complexity cannot possibly be fully understood by all of its members. It would be absurd for example to give full voting rights on strategic direction to a new hire. What I think people actually want is the sense that their voice is heard by the decision makers. They also want the opportunity to advance to the level of decision maker in their particular domain as they gain experience.
The problem that I think most organizations face is that they eventually end up with a strategic decision making level that is impenetrable by the rank and file. The people at this level only hire their friends or promote people who have similar viewpoints to them. This is incredibly demoralizing as well as toxic to the organization because you as a person who is actually doing the work have important context that the strategic leaders don't have and won't listen to.
Solving this problem is one of the more interesting systems problems out there. I'm not aware of any large organization that has truly figured this out (including national governments).
As a dev in an XL org, I agree with the parent comment: if decision-making power isn't clear from the outset, people hold important-feeling weekly sync meetings for months and then wonder why they can't hit the deadline. Also everyone disagrees as to what the product that we were building in the first place even was because nobody was in charge of clearly delineating it.
Good leadership feels like a democracy while actually being a dictatorship.
Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making.
Of course sometimes you will get a situation where someone doesn’t arrive at the solution you want anyway so you need to excise a bit of hard power, but hopefully that is rare enough that people respect it when you do it.
> Walk people towards the decision you want using a Socratic method and then let them take the credit for the decision making.
I've been trying really hard to do this. It is an impressive hack when you can pull it off.
If you have gigantic egos on your team, then getting everyone in agreement can often be expedited with a little bit of inception. My own ego is the biggest reason I have difficulty engaging in the socratic technique. And, as you note there are definitely cases where you kind of have to beat the sense into everyone else.
I am at a point where I kind of don't give a shit about the intermediate decisions and exact correctness anymore. I am far more interested in getting further down the product roadmap and seeing my entire vision unfold. Money has almost become a secondary concern to me. As long as the appropriate steps are taken, I don't even care if my name is on it anymore.
It is a lot easier to move an elephant when it performs of its own volition. The most advanced and effective forms of people management seem to involve manipulation of egos.
People like the illusion of democracy and the stability of dictatorship. As we can see from this and the other thread, when the proverbial shit rolls horizontally instead of vertically effectiveness goes down and leadership becomes impotent. The game becomes 'who can I blame this on adjacent to me?' instead of either up or down.
The best way to make everyone happy is to have the democratic discussion, hear everyone out, and then let the boss acknowledge their help and make their decision. Loyalty to the boss, regardless of their decision then determines performance. Team members did their duty by offering their best insight, whether it was selected or not.
Your sarcastic implication being that being good at managing car and space companies make him good at managing a social media company? Not only that, good enough to be better at it than his predecessor? Not only that, he's better at it within days of arriving?
Optimizing a factory is indeed quite a lot like optimizing cloud infrastructure. Different domains but there is a lot of overlapping skill set and having developed that from zero scaling Tesla is exactly the experience that would make an executive good at reducing costs and bringing Twitter to profitability.
Building cars is the place where modern efficiency practices were developed. (Much of it started in post war Japan with American auto industry help, the fusion of cultures developed something quite useful)
To be fair, Jack Dorsey rolled over his ownership into the new structure. There are few people who know twitter, it’s problems, and potential than him.
Are people really expecting Twitter to survive The Musk? His rash actions almost feel like sabotage. I honestly expect Twitter to be dead or irrelevant in 2 years at most.
Any study in this area that doesn't control for socio-economic factors is near useless, because it mainly predicts that children of successful (ie rich) people will likely grow up to be successful (ie rich). This is almost tautological.
You seem to be completely unfamiliar with the research in the field. It is well known that controlling for socioeconomic factors does not substantially impact predictive validity of standardized tests. See for example
> Scores on the SAT (a test widely used in the admissions process in the United States), secondary school grades, college grades, and SES measures from 143,606 students at 110 colleges and universities were examined, and results of these analyses were compared with results obtained using a 41-school data set including scores from the prior version of the SAT and using University of California data from prior research on the role of SES. In all the data sets, the SAT showed incremental validity over secondary school grades in predicting subsequent academic performance, and this incremental relationship was not substantially affected by controlling for SES.
> (a) SES is related to SAT scores (r = 0.42 among the population of SAT takers), (b) SAT scores are predictive of freshman grades (r = 0.47 corrected for school-specific range restriction), and (c) statistically controlling for SES reduces the estimated SAT-grade correlation from r = 0.47 to r = 0.44.
There are more studies on this, with rather consistent results. In short, poor students do about as well as rich students when matched on SAT score.
Not sure what your point is. My point is that controlling for SES is useless in context of the predictive validity of SAT. Regardless of the degree in which socioeconomic factor casually influence test scores and educational outcomes, you get no substantial gain from learning them above what you learn from test scores alone, as long as the goal is to select students who are most likely to learn and succeed at your university.
This means that admission officers who want to learn about SES of candidates in addition to learning their test scores usually either are looking for something else the student’s aptitude for learning and ability to succeed, or are completely unfamiliar with state of the research (this is sadly quite common, and this is often willful ignorance too).
This doesn't mean that SAT scores can't still be similarly predictive across socioeconomic gradients. Both of these things can be true without any inherent conflict.
Sure, it just means it's a bit of a pointless debate...
Questions that are much more interesting to me are:
* should any level of the education system attempt to correct for underlying socioeconomic factors?
* if so, how? (I would love more discussion about this because it both seems like an extremely difficult problem and because otherwise we waste all our time and energy on non-effective things like removing standardized tests from admissions requirements.)
In the software engineering interview world, for instance, a whole lot of active discussion is spent around interviewing methods. Let's make that bigger! Let's figure out how to get the people who never even make it to the interview stage today a better opportunity.
Otherwise it's like taking two plants, reducing the amount of sunlight one gets to 50% of what the other one gets for several years, then moving them both to a new environment, waiting four more years, and saying "huh, the one that was taller before we moved them 4 years ago is still taller, guess that's a good measurement to use to pick plants, since even controlling for that, the taller ones from the light-limited cohort are also ended up taller than their cohort-mates after the last 4 years!"
> Questions that are much more interesting to me are
Sure, but it's still worthwhile to point out factually inaccurate articles and deceptive papers. If they want to argue for how the education system should correct socioeconomic factors, they should do so honestly, not by lying to us that tests are useless.
I am actually familiar with some of the research actually, but thank you for your condescendence.
I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
From this same source:
> The SAT-grade relationship is not an artifact of common influences of SES on both test scores and grades
To substantiate my initial comment, test scores are highly predictive yes, but as you just linked, SES is highly predictive of test scores (and this is only for people who get to the damn test). This is the tautological part. High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes. But since this correlation is not 100% but merely very high, we can pat ourselves on the back and say hey it's accurate!
Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question than "is SAT indicative of future performance" when considering whether the SAT is useful.
> I didn't mean to imply that the SAT or grades are not predictive of future performance, only that lower socio-economic statuses will correlate to lower SAT grades in the first place, ie your (a) proposal in the second source.
Why then talk about “controlling for SES”? The correlation SES/educational ability very much exists, but why would one want control for SES? The goal is, allegedly, to test scholastic aptitude, so that we can identify students that are likely to succeed at school. If SES correlates with this ability, by controlling for this, all you’ll do is control out the effect.
> High incomes make people test well which lead to jobs with high incomes.
No, there is little evidence that high incomes makes people test well. Here, and in the entire thread, you are committing what is called a “sociologist’s fallacy”. This is from Meehl, P. E. “Nuisance variables and the ex post facto design.”:
> While every sophomore learns that a statistical correlation does not inform us as to the nature of the causality at work (although, except for sampling errors, it does presumably show some kind of causal relation latent to the covariation observed), there has arisen a widespread misconception that we can somehow, in advance, sort nuisance-variables into a class which occurs only at the input side. This is, of course, almost never the case. The usual tendency, found widely among sociologists and quite frequently among psychologists (particularly among those of strong environmentalist persuasion) is to assume sub silentio that there is a set of demographic-type variables, such as social class, domicile, education, and the like, that always operate as nuisance variables to obscure true relationships, and that function primarily as exclusively on the input side from the standpoint of causal analysis. This automatic assumption is often quite unjustified. Example: We study the relationship between some biological or social input variable, such as ethnic or religious background, upon a psychological output variable, such as IQ or achievement. We find that Protestants differ from Catholics or that Whites differ from Blacks. But we find further that the ethnic or religious groups differ in socio-economic class. We conclude, as an immediate inference and almost as a matter of course, that we have to ‘control’ for the socio-economic class variable, in order to find out what is the ‘true’ relationship between the ethnic or religious variable and the psychological output variable. But of course no such immediate inference is defensible, since on certain alternative hypotheses, such as a heavily genetic view of the determiners of social class, the result of such a ‘control’ is to bring about a spurious reduction of unknown magnitude in what is actually a valid difference
This was published over 50 years ago, but nevertheless, this mistake is done over and over in sociological research and discussions.
> Articles that defend the accuracy of the system tend to implicitly defend its legitimacy, which I think is a much more important question (…)
I actually have no idea what you mean by “legitimacy” here.
If a user wishes to underscore that a comment he is replying to is wrong, then he should do just that. There is no need for the user to attack the person making the comment.
Calling someone "completely unfamiliar" is not much of an attack. I don't think it's any worse than saying the comment is "completely wrong", but it gets the point across slightly better.
I was being charitable here. The less charitable alternative is that the person I was responding to was familiar with the literature, but nevertheless engaged in willful deception.
Since acknowledging your evidence will inhibit my ability to blame the white supremacist cis-hetereonormative ableist patriarchy for my problems I will instead respond with an anecdote about how I know a lesbian indian in a wheel chair that bombed the SATs and is now president of the united states.
well, maybe, just maybe, that's because the socio-economic status correlates positively with cognitive abilities and the kids somehow inherit the traits of their parents?
Meh. Dumb rich kids end up with positive college and career outcomes regardless of their test scores. Let’s not suggest that wealth correlates to ‘better traits’.
That's funny I grew up as one of six children and my mother was a school teacher. Guess I have to go back to my HS and tell them they need to lower my scores because I wasn't rich enough.
