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Smart People (pdf)
Repeated good outcomes provide us with confirming evidence that our strategy is good and everything is fine. This illusion lulls us into an unwarranted sense of confidence and sets us up for a surprise (usually negative).
This is a big risk. See The "Sure" Thing.
Know What You Can’t Predict
In most day-to-day decisions, cause and effect are pretty clear. If you do X, then Y will happen. But in decisions that involve systems with many interacting parts, causal links are frequently unclear. For example, what will happen with climate change? Where will terrorists strike next? When will a new technology emerge? Remember what Warren Buffett said: “Virtually all surprises are unpleasant.” So considering the worst-case scenarios is vital and generally overlooked in prosperous times.
In my opinion, what a great article!
This post inspired by GYSC.
Real Estate Newsletter Articles this Week: Existing-Home Sales Increased to
4.15 million SAAR in November
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At the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter this week:
[image: Existing Home Sales]*Click on graph for larger image.*
• NAR: Existing-Home Sales Increase...
17 hours ago
7 comments:
[RANT]
For Pete's sake, what a flashback:
"Repeated good outcomes...This illusion lulls us into an unwarranted sense of confidence..."
Picture this: it's 1999 and you are one of millions of either newly minted Bachelor of Science IT professionals or you've "been around" and have "experience" to leverage.
Now, you're sitting at your desk (which you probably haven't been sitting at long because you've become used to "jumping" in order to capitalize on rapid increases in salaries or "retention adjustments", LOL) and during a typical working day you receive 1 to N (most likely N) calls from headhunters who have a "killer" position just waiting for someone with the "skillz" (yes, skills with a 'Z') that you have.
And after a few days/weeks/months of this routine you just might begin to be "lull[ed]...into an unwarranted sense of confidence and sets us up for a surprise"!
The surprise being that in 2001, suddenly, it does not require so many people to dig through countless lines of code to find that pesky bug which causes a dropdown box to trash the memory on the i386 PC being used at the Wayne State Public Library systems Inter-Library-Loan machine!!
[/RANT]
And on a more subdued note, I currently watching/listening to "All The President's Men" on TMC, one of my all time favs.
G.H.,
Very amusing rant! I'll be stealing your form in mine. The following is a glimpse of my last days in a game company I'd worked at for 8 years. True story. 1999 is when I quit. 1999! What a year!!
[RANT]
Picture this: It's 1999 and you are one of the few remaining long-time lead software engineers within the company (most have recently quit, been laid off, or have been fired). You've been on a million dollar project for a year and there is still NO game design other than a simple 5 page document typed in a big font in which 2 of the pages are simply copied word for word off of the other 3 pages. As you can imagine, the design is so vague that it would apply to every other computer game in the history of mankind. I wish I could say I was joking.
And after a few MONTHS of this routine you know the "surprise" is coming, it's just a matter of timing.
The surprise being that the project is canceled. You are offered to join another project that you know with 99.99% certainty will fail too. How do you know? The entire team just spent an hour debating whether or not the ears of elves should be pointed or not! I must have missed a lullaby of overconfidence seminar, because I'm pretty sure that's what they would teach.
And after a few days/weeks/months of this routine you are put on yet another project, as a temporary position until they can figure out what exactly to do with you.
One day, a Wednesday, you are told that yet another project is in serious trouble. It needs to ship ASAP. You are being put on it to help out. You'll start Friday. You aren't told this, but you can picture the fun that weekend. There's a reason you'll be starting on a Friday. You aren't paid overtime. You are on a salary. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. When asked how you feel about being moved, you don't actually answer the question. Instead, you politely say that the review you were supposed to get months ago never arrived. This leaves a very puzzled look on your boss's face and an awkward moment of silence.
You go to lunch with a friend and state that you pretty sure you are going to quit. You've had enough.
Thursday, you are told that you don't need to go to the other team. You've been given a silver bullet. Apparently your review observation did its work and they still value you. You call your friend up and say that you aren't going to quit after all.
However, that night you do not sleep well at all, until the point you actually decide to quit. You then sleep much better. Friday you quit. You think of quoting physics. An object in motion remains in motion. They applied a force. They removed it. I was that object. I was still in motion.
Just as you are about to hand your letter of resignation over to your boss, you get a call from another lead engineer who just quit. He thought he had the top news of the day, but sadly he was forced to share it with you. HR finds the thought of two long-time lead engineers quitting on the same day, without warning, and neither with actual jobs lined up, very "disconcerting".
[/RANT]
Never did regret the decision! As a side note, I was not at all upset with my boss at the time I quit. I liked him. I also liked my coworkers. I did not like where the company was headed though.
If you feel so inclined, check out the "2000's" section for what I missed out on. I was a rat. The ship was sinking. I did what rats do, lol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Entertainment
Stag,
Your's is an enthralling story and one that I'm sure was played out in many more than just your company.
In those days we had a "Bonanza"ish situation of hard work leading to the dream/possibility of prosperity. In my view it all boiled down to competentcy. Unless you were highly competent (and could produce at what I call "the world's speed") you were out after 2000/2001.
I've always been able to write useful computer programs using C++/MFC/COM architecture. In fact, I've written and currently use several programs to track various forms of equity and fixed income securities as well as programs that produce and encrypt passwords for use in all manner of Internet commerce. However, when it comes to producing finished product at "the world's speed", it seems that I don't measure up.
That being said, what I did produce commercially was always superior from a bug-free standpoint than my counterparts. It's just that it took me too long to reach perfection.
I like to tell my father that I could write software to fly an airplane. The problem is, by the time I finished, airplanes would be replaced with a different form of travel. Sigh...
G.H.,
C++ was my language of choice.
"That being said, what I did produce commercially was always superior from a bug-free standpoint than my counterparts. It's just that it took me too long to reach perfection."
Bug free is a very noble goal. I suspect that your superiors did not fully grasp the concept of just how much bugs really cost them. The products I worked on were very bug free. I did not tolerate bugs. I never shipped a known bug. It was a matter of pride to me.
I've seen SO much time wasted trying to track down and fix bugs that should have never been allowed to infest a product in the first place. I'd pretty much stop the presses at the first sign of a bug though. Once a product gets infested, bug fighting becomes much more difficult.
At one point, I was helping another team that wrote a buggy editor. It crashed every single time they ran it and few seemed to even care. That is not acceptable to me. I made it my job to fix that thing. It wasted time for anyone who used it, a minute here and a minute there. At some point those minutes add up. Worse, without knowing why it crashed how can you ever trust the data it works on? Turns out it was overwriting memory every time it ran. That's bad news.
You might get a kick out of this from 2002...
Study: Buggy software costs users, vendors nearly $60B annually
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/72245/Study_Buggy_software_costs_users_vendors_nearly_60B_annually
I don't doubt it.
And here's something that might provide a tickle...
http://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/
"...some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic."
Uh huh...
Mark said:
"You go to lunch with a friend and state that you pretty sure you are going to quit. You've had enough."
And then you go out on your own and create 'Halo' and the rest is history!
(Sorry Mark, but that was like leaving a cooler full of beer in front of an alcoholic)
G.H.,
I think I need to start handing out awards!
watchtower,
(I'd accept your apology but I cannot read inside your parentheses. What happens inside parentheses, stays inside parentheses. It's kind of like Vegas.)
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