Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Overconfidence is a huge benefit in playing the political game - getting people to take you seriously, managing up, interfacing with the outside world. Like it or not, humans are primed to respond to confidence; for most people, listing the dozen ways a system may fail signals that you shouldn't use the system, while for engineers, it signals that these are a dozen things to be fixed.

The trick - when getting to higher levels of technical management - is learning how to context-switch between being overconfident for the benefit of non-technical stakeholders and being paranoid with the technology so that the things that could go wrong don't actually go wrong.

View on HN

Right, this is really a tricky game. I help run a nonprofit wiki farm, so a lot of our business is out in the open. We lost one of our clients because they were hanging out in the IRC while we were discussing the cost of an upgrade and the technical issues facing it, as the exit question revealed that they thought we were running out of money.

Now of course donations in the past few months have been roughly double our expenses -- information which is also public. But it's very hard to project confidence during a problem solving session, because it gets in the way of actual problem solving.

I wish I knew where the balance point for secretiveness and openness was for public organizations. But given that all of the candidates for U.S. President seem to be at a bad place, I'm starting to wonder if a perfect balance point even exists.

This is why I don't really want to get back into management, even though sometimes I think at some point it will be the only thing I'll have the patience and mental capacity to do. I saw the best and worst of myself when I was a manager- the worst is what scared me. But moreover, I learned after I stopped being a manager that I didn't deserve the accolades I got. If you were to take the best manager in the world, give him/her a shitty team, a hell of shitty code, shitily designed application and infrastructure, a shitty relationship with the customers/users, shitty support team, and shitty project/product/upper management, and you don't let that manager work to fix these things, they'll quit or fail, guaranteed. If you give them the best of all of these things, they will succeed, guaranteed. Being a good manager- knowing how to manage well and doing it, can be critical. However, it is nothing on its own.

One big difference is that a good manager can take an average team and build a good team over time. If you can't do that, you aren't a good manager.

A manager that can't tell who on their team is good will (in the long run) take an average team and turn it into a bad team.

>Like it or not, humans are primed to respond to confidence

Exactly. My feeling is that while perhaps many of us learned this the hard way, well at least I did--from experience--in hindsight it seems obvious that our emotional impulses and intuitions, while albeit valuable, are not fine-tuned to success in technical careers.

I think intuition and emotional impulses is immensely important for communicating with non-technical stakeholders. They haven't learned the art of emulating a computer so we've got to be a human being. IMHO.

Yea, I agree with that actually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com