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Comment by jensensbutton | Hacker News Reader

> you cannot pretend something is working when it isn't

You absolutely can. The problem is in the ambiguity around the work "working". Take for example the case of a person/team shipping a poor quality implementation which is initially celebrated and rewarded (because no one realizes it's a poor quality implementation) only to fall over in production and cause large problems/disruption for the team/product/business.

This is not an uncommon scenario in software development and I would argue is a case of people pretending (or thinking) something is working when it isn't.

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> The problem is in the ambiguity around the work "working".

We (engineers, scientists, whatever) exploit ambiguity as a work avoidance strategy all the time, but for many fields exploiting ambiguity is the work. IMO it's like the difference between a think tank abusing statistical bias versus using a firehose of falsehood to push their agenda. Ambiguity is just a tool in the former case that occasionally causes problems, but it is the life blood of the latter tactic and creates a much more destructive atmosphere for critical thinking and societal trust in general.

> "for many fields"

Like what? Marketing, politics maybe, what else?

Law maybe? Economics? Journalism. Definitely all of wall street and the entire crypto industry. Every single sales person since the dawn of time... Real Estate agents (I guess those are sales people).

I agree with everything you have said and I have a mental game I play to quantify it.

It's the "how many people could leave this company before anyone noticed?" game.

Software organizations have such good margins on capital they can afford to hire extraordinary quantities of dead weight before they become unsustainable. I've been at organizations where probably 75% of the software engineering org could be fired with no impact on creativity, growth, or maintenance efficacy.

It's actually the efficiency of software that allows ineffective people to stick around without being noticed. Contra this article, I've noticed whole sections of the software industry deliberately float around organizations at scale. They're typically the people with a boatload of "ex-Cool Company" in their LinkedIn handles.

Sure, but even in your example the it doesn't take long before something hits the fan. On the other hand the trickle down theory of economics (for example) is still going.

Communism and rent control's 100% failure rate has never dissuaded any of their adherents.

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