Why You Suck

This is a post about Why You Suck. Since this is the rhetorical “you” that refers to a least-assumptions unknown person, it’s also about me and Why I Suck. Or, perhaps I should say that it’s about why all of us tend toward Suck sometimes. What do I mean by Suck? I mean that we’re so terrified of failure and embarrassment that it pushes to mediocrity and, at the extreme, entrenched anti-intellectualism.

Take fine arts, for one topic, because it’s one that draws out a lot of peoples’ insecurities. It’s actually quite hard to get a sophisticated understanding of what makes, say, opera good or bad. I don’t have it. I enjoy opera, but I don’t have the palette to have an informed opinion on the quality of an individual piece. I like it, or I don’t, but there’s nothing I have in terms of sophistication or exposure that gives me an elevated skill at critique. If I pretend to have a deep knowledge of opera, then I’ll sound like a fool. Now, you might be saying: so what? What’s wrong with having a mediocre exposure to opera? Why would anyone be insecure about that? It’s not a sign of a lack of talent. I just haven’t specialized in the appreciation of it. Well, that’s because it’s not a defining part of who I am. However, there are a lot of people who realize how hard it is to become fluent in something, and therefore get discouraged prematurely. It bothers them, because they really want to get good. When it doesn’t happen quickly, a lot of people go the other way and say “it’s esoteric and not worth knowing”. I say, bullshit. You don’t know it, and I don’t know it, but that doesn’t make it “not worth knowing”.

Let’s talk about foreign languages, another place where this attitude emerges. The fear there isn’t that learning a new language is hard (without exposure, it is; with exposure, most people can do it, at any age). It’s about embarrassment. No one wants to look like an idiot by getting words wrong. People would rather use the language they know best. That’s reasonable, but some people take it a step further and decide that some topic in which they lack knowledge just isn’t important. I mean, how much does opera do for us in our daily lives? For fine arts, that’s just passive anti-intellectualism. When it comes to foreign languages and cultures, which have every bit as much validity as our own but are often rejected as “unimportant” by the insecure, it’s being an asshole.

We all end up doing this. We find something we’re not good at and the first thing we want to do is find a reason why it’s not important. That’s why intellectually insecure politicians cut funding for public universities; they hate those “ivory tower” academics who make them feel stupid. It takes a certain awareness to look at the world and say, “this place is so big that, for everything I learn, there will be a billion things worth knowing, that I never will, because there isn’t the time to get good at everything”.

So, many people go off in the opposite direction. They conclude that the things they’ll never get good at (often by choice) are just useless and retrench in their anti-intellectualism. This is especially severe in the software industry (don’t even get me started on anti-intellectualism) where, in many companies, taking an interest in doing things right as opposed to the empty-suit-friendly bastardization of “object-oriented programming” that has been in corporate practice for the past 20 years will often make you a weirdo, a pariah, one who cares too much.

By the way, d’ya want to know why so many of us software engineers have shitty jobs that make us unhappy? Well, we don’t have a strong professional identity. Doctors report to other doctors. Lawyers report to other lawyers (by law) unless directly to the corporate board. Engineers (actual engineers, not “software engineers”) report to engineers. We, on the other hand, report to professional managers who think what we do is “detail-oriented grunt work”. To add to the insult, they often think they could do our jobs, because they’re smarter than us (otherwise, we’d have their jobs). Why is this? Why are we, as software engineers, in such a degraded state? Perhaps it is because we, as a tribe, are anti-intellectual. If we don’t know what functional-reactive programming is, many of us are ready to conclude that it’s “weird” and impractical and “not worth knowing”. (Oh, and I’ve seen hard-core functional programmers take the same attitude toward C and low-level coding and it’s equally ridiculous.) Don’t get me wrong; there are a large number of individual exceptions to that. I enjoy programming– and I don’t identify fully as a programmer; I’m only a 96ish percentile programmer but I’m a fucking murderous problem-solver– and I care so much about keeping up my programming skills because I’m not anti-intellectual. And because it’s fucking cool. I had a boss (a very smart guy, but clueless on technology) once who said he refused to learn programming because he thought it’d  kill his creativity. That’s that same anti-intellectualism on the opposing side. Perhaps it’s karma. Perhaps the anti-intellectualism that characterizes the average member of our tribe (defined loosely to include all professional programmers, the average of us being terrible not for a lack of talent, but mediocre drive) makes us a perfect karmic match for that other anti-intellectual tribe: the executives and “big picture” moneymen who boss us around.

Okay, I’m going to get to the source of all this devastating mediocrity.

“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Social status.”

Yeah, I know. That sounds ridiculous, no? I’ll explain it.

Some will recognize the quote from The Social Network, in which Justin Timberlake portrays Sean Parker as an ambitious uber-douche who says the above quote, but with “a billion dollars” instead of “social status”. I re-appropriated it, because I’ve wanted for a long time to understand why we as humans are so incompetent at, well, being human, and doing so required me to understand human status hierarchies. So I douche-ified the un-Parker-like quote even further. Wanting to be a billionaire is pretty douchey, but why would one want so much money? It’s social status, the driving ambition of the douchebag (and a lesser ambition, alas, for all of us).

Take unemployment. Why is it that during a three- to six-month stretch of joblessness, the average person (with men being much more sensitive to this effect) will do less housework and perform more poorly on side projects than when that person has a full-time job? Most jobs don’t add much to a person’s life. A monolithic and inflexible obligation, usually toward ingrates, that by explicit design makes diversification of labor investment almost impossible, is hard to call a good thing for a person. Society has actually had to work at it to make the alternative (joblessness) so embarrassing that it’s worse for the vast majority of people. The social status penalty of not having a job must be so severe that people refuse to tolerate joblessness. One boss fires ‘em; they look for another. However, in the long term, this exacerbates the real underlying problem, which is that they’re so job-dependent that they’ve forgotten how to serve others (in trade, and often for personal benefit) in any other context. Anyway, my point here is that the embarrassing nature of joblessness has been made so severe that it’s worse for a typical person’s well-being (and out-of-work completion) than spending 8-10 hours in an office.

Our minds and our bodies are constantly taking signals as to our social standing, and reacting in ways we often can’t control. I’ve often believed that, at the least, mild depression emerged as an adaptive response to survival of transient low social status. Of course, the disease depression is something different: a pathology of that mechanism, which might trigger for no reason. I only mean to suggest that the machinery might be there for an evolutionary purpose. That also, to be, explains why exercise is so effective in treating mild depression. It tells the body that the person is of high social status (invited on the hunt) and causes the brain to perk up a little bit.

People often say, “I don’t give a fuck what other people think about me”. Bullshit. If that were true, you’d never say it– almost by definition, you wouldn’t, because it’s something people say to seem badass. Unfortunately, it misses the point. First, it’s dishonest. We’re biologically programmed to care what others think about us. To be ashamed of it is to be ashamed of our own humanity. Second, there’s good badass and bad badass and insane badass. Insane badasses don’t care what others think of them because they suffer frank mental illness that overrides even the most blunt social signals. Bad badasses generally quite a bit about their own social status; they just don’t have much empathy and therefore only care about others’ opinions when it interferes with them getting what they want. Good badasses, on the  other hand, are empathetic but they are also committed to virtue even in the face of unpopularity. All three types have a claim to not caring (as much as normal people do) what others think, but only one of those three is desirable.

Why do people make such a boast about not caring what others think? That’s because we abstractly admire that sort of emotional independence. In practice, it can go either way whether that’s a good trait. If you really don’t care at all about how your actions affect others, then you’re an asshole. Now, I’m generally on-board with a certain virtuous investment in actions over results, for sure. I also take a certain pride (not always to my benefit) in virtuous actions that lead to socially adverse results– because I am morally and intellectually superior to, at least, the dominant forces in our society (I can’t adequately compare myself either way to “the average person” because I don’t know him, but I am demonstrably superior to those running this world and that’s an obvious fact of my life) and I revel in it. I also still think that if you don’t care at all to pick up signals about how your actions are really affecting the world, then you’re just being a dick. You should care– just a little bit, but not zero– what other people think of you, especially as pertains to your effect on others. If you are helping people and suffering social adversity, you might be virtuous and that adversity might exist because the people who fling it at you are the epitome of vice and parasitism. On the other hand, social adversity might also be a sign that you’re doing things wrong. You should at least listen to the signal. If you understand its source and recognize that source as not worth caring about, then fine. Not listening makes you a jerk, however. 

So… I hope I’ve shot down the “I don’t care what others think” defense. I’m more badass than most people who say this and I care what other people think about me.

Now, I want to go back to “You know what’s cool?” No one can visualize a billion dollars. People with that much wealth never even see the pile of cash, except for Walter White. That billion-dollar net worth is just a linear combination of a bunch of other numbers about them strewn across the world. What they own, by entity and percentage. Who owes them money. To whom they owe money. That is a kind of social status, but a stable and legally recognized one called “ownership”. So there we are. All of economics is predicated on the idea that people want resources and money; and one of the biggest reasons, I would argue, that they want it is that it’s psychological: they want the social status. If that seems unduly negative, it shouldn’t be. Social status is the only reason I have a computer to write this post on, or a cup of coffee to drink in the morning. I’m able, because I speak certain natural and social languages and have certain skills (that I acquired by being born into the right country family, distinguishing myself early in academics, etc.) to get people to pay me for services that others could perform more cheaply (most of those cheap competitors wouldn’t do it as well, but neither would most of the higher-status, better-paid ones). Gift economies don’t scale. We can interact with the market only if we can prove by certificate (e.g. money) that someone thinks we have some status or value (making us worthy of employment or ownership of an asset) and so all of us need some kind of status, even if it’s just a little bit. It’s horrible that the world works that way, and that a person of merit might fail due to extreme lows of social status, but it’s how things work right now.

Now, a billion dollars isn’t cool. Even the disgusting rich douchebags don’t actually sleep (to quote Don Draper) on “a bed made of money”. Money is paper that would disgust us (because of all the places it has been) were it not for a certain social value. Rather, it’s the social elevation that drives people. “Money” is not the root of all evil; social status is. That’s what most people, and especially douchebags, find “cool”. Green cotton paper, even at the 10-ton level a billion dollars would require, has little to do with it.

In fact, we can tie social status to all of the seven deadly sins:

• wrath: people use threatening emotions, postures, and violent actions to defend social status. 
• envy: people covet social status and delight in the destruction of higher-status individuals.
• sloth: unconditional “passive” social status (i.e. that doesn’t require work) is always preferable over kinds that are contingent on productive activity, which one might lose the ability to perform at an acceptable exchange rate (health problems, disinterest, superior competition).
• lust: one of the primary reasons for high-status people to seek even higher levels of status (to the detriment of social and mental health) is the desire to indulge in sexual perversion.
  
• greed: this one’s obvious. Most of the assets that inspire greed confer social status. People are rarely greedy toward things that don’t.
• pride: also obvious. People create an outsized self-image out of a desire for deserved high status, then expect the world to conform to their grandiose self-perceptions.
• gluttony: defined literally, this is an odd-man-out in modern times because obesity lowers one’s social status, but if we extend the metaphor to material overindulgence, we see it as a form of posturing. Conspicuous consumption enables a person to prove high social status, thus maintaining it.

Of course, all of those sins are also sources of Suck– yours and mine. They blind us, make us do short-sighted and stupid things, and generally leave us bereft of moral courage, curiosity, creativity, and virtue. It turns out that social status is a driving force behind what makes humans horrible. The concern for social status seems, in many people, to be limitless and only more productive of vice and evil as they gain more of it. Satiation in most commodities sets in, and people stop being horrible. It’s rare to see two people fight over a piece of bread in an upscale restaurant, because average Americans are rich enough not to turn to vice over food. With social status, that’s not the case for many people. They don’t reach satiation and revert to virtue, but get worse as they climb and (a) satiation proves elusive, while (b) the competition for status becomes fiercer as they climb the ladder. They go beyond Suck and into outright Vice. Yeshua of Nazareth was right on: you cannot serve God and Mammon.

But back to Suck…

Vice is an interesting topic in its own right, but I’m here to talk about Suck. You and I both Suck. I don’t think I’m a vicious or bad person, and I doubt most of my readers are. However, we do things that are counterproductive. We avoid learning new technologies because “I might not get any good at it, and just embarrass myself.” We might do the right thing despite threat of social unpopularity, but it’s really hard and we spend so many clock cycles convincing ourselves that we’re doing the right thing that it takes the edge off of us. It’s almost impossible to excel at anything in this world. Why? Well, excellence is risky.

Something I read on Hacker News really impressed me. It explained a lot. I think it resonates with all the top-10% programmers out there who are constantly pushing themselves (often despite economic incentives, because there is a point where being a better programmer hurts your job security) to be better. Here it is (link):

No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It’s the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.

Now, on the surface this is true. Failure is extremely demoralizing. However, as I think about it, it’s not project failure itself that brings us down. It’s annoying. It’s a learning experience that doesn’t go the way we hoped. In the discovery process, it usually means we discovered a way not to do things (which has lower information-theoretic value) than a way to do them. However, failure itself I do not think is the major problem. I think people who are used to doing hard things can learn to accept it in stride.

I am constantly trying hard things and attacking high-risk problems. I took difficult proof-based math exams in high school and college where very few people could solve even half of the problems in the allotted time. I’ve tried a great many things with sub-50-percent chances of success, and had some hits… and a lot of misses. Failure is difficult. It’s a struggle. It’s already hard without the world conspiring to make it harder. But it’s the social status damage that comes out of failure that really stops a person. That’s the force that pushes people toward self-protecting careerist mediocrity as they get older. Yes, it’s learned helplessness, but it’s not mere project failure that induces the neurological penalty. A more supportive, R&D-like, environment (as opposed to the mean-spirited caprice of contemporary private-sector social climbing) could mitigate that. (I worked at a think tank once where the unofficial motto was “bad ideas are good; good ideas are great” and that supportiveness motivated people to do some outright excellent work.) Failure isn’t what ruins people. It’s the dogshit heaped on a person by society after a project failure that has that effect. After a while, people get tired of the (transient, but extremely stressful) low social status that follows a failed project, and give up on high-risk excellence.

Going forward

Awareness of Suck and its causes is the first step toward overcoming it. Denying that one experiences it personally is not generally helpful, because almost everyone Sucks to some degree, and there are powerful neurological and social reasons for that. Admitting vulnerability to it is like admitting physical inferiority to polar bears; none should be ashamed of it, it’s just how nature made us.

Why are people so mediocre, both in moral and creative terms? We now have the tools to answer that question. We know where Suck comes from. And we can work, a little bit each day, on making ourselves not Suck. 

More important, however, is finding a way not to induce Suck in other people. I’m going to pull something else from Hacker News that I like a lot, this time from the Hacker School‘s social rules. I’m not going to post all of them; let me just give a flavor:

The first of these rules is no feigning surprise. This means you shouldn’t act surprised when someone says he doesn’t know something. This applies to both technical things (“What?! I can’t believe you don’t know what the stack is!”) and non-technical things (“You don’t know who RMS is?!”).

I’ll admit that I’m guilty of this, too. My eyes glaze over when another programmer mentions Visitor or Factory design patterns and doesn’t seem to be trolling me. Maybe I’m slightly better, in that Visitor usage is a positive symptom of idiocy while not knowing something is a negative symptom, and we all have an infinitude of negative idiocy-signals (because there are infinitely many things we don’t know and, arguably, should). Or maybe not. Maybe I should stop being a dick and assume (despite what Bayes would say) that the programmer who says “Visitor pattern” with a straight face is a talented person who just never learned better.

Other behaviors explicitly discouraged are cosmetic correction (over-cutting someone’s essentially correct statement with an irrelevantly more correct one) and backseat driving. This is good. Hacker School is making an admirable attempt to clear out the social processes that sometimes make intermediate-level programmers embarrassed by the gaps in their knowledge. thus risk-averse. That’s a great thing, because after a while, people who are made to feel insecure about gaps in knowledge tend to fly the other way, and that produces the “that topic isn’t important” anti-intellectualism.

Hacker School’s getting it right. If people aren’t afraid for their own social status, they’re more inclined to take risks, grow faster, and excel. This is an ideology that gets a lot of mouth-honor, but few people follow it.

Even VC-istan claims to “embrace” failure, but the reality is that “fail fast” is often an excuse for impulsive firing (without severance, typically) and “lean startup” often means “we want you to work 90 hours a week and be your own assistant instead of working 60 and hiring one”. The reality is that VC-istan’s collusive reputation economy allows it to be anything but tolerant of business failure, even the good-faith kind.

The only work culture in which project failure is tolerated is the R&D one. Most companies these days have mean-spirited, fast-firing cultures where a project failure results in someone getting fired, demoted, or punished for it. Sometimes there’s no one at fault and someone just gets randomly hit. Or, when there is someone at fault, it might not be that person who suffers (it usually isn’t, as bad managers are great at shifting blame). The result of the mean-spirited, fast-firing, performance-reviews-with-teeth structure of the modern corporate workplace is that competent people rarely invest themselves in efforts that might fail, even if successes will be enormously beneficial. Instead, they strive to put themselves on highly visible projects, but those with enough momentum that they are extremely unlikely to fail. The result of this is that project genesis has almost no ambition in it, and most of the best people aren’t coming up with ideas anyway, but looking to draft on someone else’s. Of course, by the time a project shows sure visible victory, so many people are aware of it that the competition to be “in on it” is cutthroat. (Closed-allocation companies aren’t about doing work, but about holding positions and being “on” important projects.)

If you have the open-allocation, high-autonomy R&D culture where good-faith failure is treated as a learning experience and people can move on gracefully, you get a sharing of knowledge because people are no longer pressed to hide failures. If you have anything else in a white-collar environment, however, you’re likely to end up with a blame-shifting culture. That’s where Suck really starts to assert itself, and take control.

“Fail fast” is not an excuse for being a moron, a flake, or a scumbag.

I wrote before on technology’s ethical crisis, a behavioral devolution that’s left me rather disgusted with the society and culture of venture-funded technology startups, also known as “VC-istan”. There are a lot of problems with the venture-funded technology industry, and I only covered a few of them in that post. Barely addressed was that so much of what we do is socially worthless bubble bullshit, like Zynga– which, in my mind, only proves that a company can be taken seriously even when its name sounds like 4th-grade anatomical slang. Most of us in venture-funded technology are merely bankers, except for the distinction that we buy and sell internet ads instead of securities. This world of crappy imitations and bad ideas exists because there’s a class of entrepreneurs (who are well-liked by venture capitalists) who’ve become convinced that “the idea doesn’t matter”. That’s ridiculous! It’s good to pivot, and sometimes one has to change or abandon an idea to survive, but ideas and purposes do matter. When this fast-and-loose attitude is taken toward ideas, the result is that stupid ideas get lots of funding. That’s unpleasant to look at, but it doesn’t have the moral weight of some of VC-istan’s deeper problems, which I’ve already addressed. To pore into those, I think we have to look at a two-word good idea taken too far, and in horribly wrong directions: fail fast.

As a systems engineering term, “fail-fast” is the principle that a failing component should report failure, and stop operation, immediately, rather than attempting to continue in spite of its malfunction. The diametric opposite of this is “silent failure”, which is almost always undesirable. In software engineering, it’s generally understood that an average runtime bug is 10 times as costly as one found in the compilation process, and that a “do-the-wrong-thing” silent bug can be 10 to 1000 times more costly than one that throws a visible error at runtime. In software engineering, redundant systems are usually preferable because components can fail (and they will, for causes ranging from programming errors to hardware defects to data corruption caused by cosmic rays) without bringing the whole system down and, in these, for dysfunctional components to halt fast is usually a desirable behavior.

In the systems case, it’s important to look at what “fail” and “fast” mean. Fail means to stop operation once there is a detected possibility of erroneous behavior. Fast means to report the failure as soon as possible. Whether it’s a bug in software or a defect in a manufacturing process, it’s always astronomically cheaper to fix it earlier rather than later. The idea isn’t to glorify failure. It’s an acknowledgment that failure happens, and it’s a strategy for addressing it. Fail fast doesn’t mean “make things unreliable”. It means “be prepared for unexpected wrongness, and ready to fix it immediately”.

In VC-istan, “fail fast” is an attitude taken toward business, in which failure becomes almost a badge of honor. I believe this is intended as an antidote for the far more typical and pernicious attitude toward business failure, which is to personalize and stigmatize it, as seen in “middle America” and most of Europe. I’ll agree that I prefer the fail-fast attitude over the paralyzing risk aversion of most of the world. The reason Silicon Valley is able to generate technological innovation at a rate faster than any other place is this lack of stigma against good-faith failure. On the other hand, I find the cavalier attitude toward failure to often veer into frank irresponsibility, and that’s what I want to address.

The typical VC startup founder is rich. Without inherited connections, it takes about twelve months worth of work without a salary to produce something that VCs will even look at. (With such connections, VC mentoring comes immediately and a fundable product can be built within about half that time.) Even for the rich and well-connected, it’s dicey. VC acceptance rates are typically below 1 percent, so a lot of good ideas are being rejected, even coming from well-positioned people. Raising money is always hard, but for people who aren’t wealthy, the risk is generally intolerable: twelve months without salary and a high likelihood that it will amount to zilch. Why’s this relevant? Because rich people can afford a cavalier attitude toward failure. Losing a job just means moving vacations around. If one company dies, another can be built.

In an ideal world, everyone would be rich, by which I mean that material limits wouldn’t dominate peoples’ lives and their work in the way they do now. This would be a world of such abundance as to implicitly provide the safety associated with socialism, without the drawbacks, and in which poverty would be eliminated as thoroughly as smallpox. I believe humanity will reach a state like this, but probably not until the end of my lifetime, if not some time after I’m dead. In this “post-scarcity” world, libertarian capitalism would actually be a great system (and so it’s easy to see why out-of-touch rich people like it so much). Business failure would just be the impersonal death of bad ideas, resources would quickly be allocated to the good ones, and people would rise into and fall out of leadership positions as appropriate but could gracefully decline when not needed, rather than having to fire their help, pull their kids out of college, or move halfway across the country when this happens. If everyone were rich, libertarian capitalism would be a wonderful economic system. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. We have to make do with what we have.

In the real world, failure hurts people, and most of those people aren’t 23-year-olds with $5-million trust funds. Investors (not all of whom are rich) lose large amounts of money, and employees get fired, often without notice or severance. Careers of innocent people can be damaged. This doesn’t mean that failure is morally unacceptable. Good-faith failure must be accepted, because if failure leads to broad-based social rejection, you end up with a society where no one takes real risk and no advancement occurs. This isn’t an abstract danger. It’s something that most people see every single fucking day in the typical corporate workplace: a bland, risk-intolerant environment where people are so afraid of social rejection that people torture themselves in order to seem busy and important, but no one is taking creative risks, and real work isn’t getting done. So my attitude toward those who take risk and fail in good faith is one of empathy and, sometimes, admiration. I’ve been there. It happens to almost everyone who wants to accomplish something in this world.

My issue with “fail fast”, and the more general cavalier attitude toward business failure observed in VC-istan, is that people who espouse this mantra generally step outside the bounds of good-faith failure, responsible risk-taking, and ethical behavior. When you take millions of dollars of someone else’s money, you should try really fucking hard not to fail. It’s a basic ethical responsibility not to let others depend on you unless you will do your best not to let them down. You should put your all into the fight. If you give it your best and don’t make it, you’ve learned a lot on someone else’s dime. That’s fine. The problem with “fail fast” is that it sounds to me a lot like “give up early, when shit gets hard”. People with that attitude will never achieve anything.

Usually, the worst “fail fast” ethical transgressions are against employees rather than investors. Investors have rights. Dilute their equity in an unfair way, and a lawsuit ensues. Throw the business away recklessly, and end up in court– possibly in jail. One can’t easily fire an investor either; at the least, one has to give the money back. On the other hand, a remnant of the flat-out elitist, aristocratic mindset that we have to kill the shit out of every couple hundred years (cf. French Revolution) is the concept that investors, socially speaking, deserve to outrank employees. This is absurd and disgusting because employees are the most important actual investors, by far, in a technology company. Money investors are just putting in funds (and, in the case of VC, money that belongs to other people). They deserve basic respect of their interests for this, but it shouldn’t qualify them (as it does) to make most of the important decisions. Employees, for contrast, are investing their time, careers, creative energy, and raw effort, often for pay that is a small fraction of the value they add. Morally speaking, it means they’re putting a lot more into the venture.

I’ve seen too many sociopaths using “fail fast” rhetoric to justify their irresponsible risk-taking. One example of a fail-fast acolyte is someone in his mid-20s whom I once saw manage the technical organization of an important company. I won’t get into too many details, but it’s an ongoing and catastrophic failure, and although it’s evident to me at least (because I’ve seen this shit before) that he is personally headed toward disaster, it’s not clear whether the company will follow him down the drain. (That company is in serious danger of failing an important deliverable because of decisions he made.) I hope it doesn’t. First, he took a scorched earth policy toward the existing code, which was written under tight deadline pressure. (Despite this twerp’s claims to the contrary about the “old team”, the engineers who wrote it were excellent, and the code quality problems were a direct result of the deadline pressure.) I don’t consider that decision an unusual moral failure on his part. Give a 25-year-old programmer the authority to burn a bunch of difficult legacy code and he usually will. At that age, I probably would have done so as well. That’s one very good reason not to give snot-nosed kids the reins to important companies without close supervision. I remember being 18 and thinking I knew everything. A decade later… turns out I really didn’t. Taken too far, the “fail fast” mentality appeals to impulsive young males who enjoy waving a gun around and shooting at things they can’t see and don’t understand.

My second encounter with this person’s “fail fast” sociopathy was in a discussion of hiring strategy, in which he discussed building “30/60/90 plans” for new hires, which would entail milestones that new employees would be expected to meet. As a way of setting guidelines, this is not a bad idea. Technology workplaces are a bit too dynamic for people to actually know what a person’s priorities should be three months in advance, but it’s always good to have a default plan and baseline expectations. New hires typically come on board, in a chaotic environment, not knowing what’s expected or how to “on-board”, and a bit of structure is a useful. This little sociopath wanted to take things a bit further. He thought it would be a good idea to fire people immediately if they missed the targets. New hire takes 35 days to meet the 30-day goal? Gone, after one month. No chance to move to another part of the organization, no opportunity to improve, no notice, no severance, and it’s all made “fair” by putting all new hires on a PIP from the outset. I’m pretty sure, I’ll note, that this young twerp has never been fired himself– and my money’s on him being three to 12 months away from his first experience with it, depending on how fast he can learn that primary executive skill of shifting blame, and how long he can run it. These sorts of terrible ideas emerge when people are permitted to take irresponsible risks with others’ careers. Most of the damaging HR “innovations” companies invent (which become tomorrow’s morale-damaging bureaucratic cruft) occur not because they’re good ideas for the company, but because people within these companies want to propose wacky ideas that affect other people, in the hope that some “greater fool” in upper-management will see the half-baked concept as “visionary” and promote the person who invented it, regardless of the idea’s lack of merit. That’s how Google’s douche-tsunami (douchenami?) system of stack-ranking and “calibration scores”, for just one example, was born.

I don’t like people who are cavalier about failure when they haven’t been on the other side of it, either as an investor who lost a large sum of money, or as a laid-off or unjustly-fired employee. To put it plainly and simply: “failing fast” with other peoples’ risk is not courage. I say this as someone who has taken a lot of risks and failed a few times, who has always accepted the consequences of what he has started, and who has always done everything possible to make sure that anyone taking a risk with me knows what he or she is getting into.

I’m going to advise something altogether different from “fail fast”, because the term “fast” has chronological implications that I don’t find useful. Protracted failures driven by denial are bad, sure. I agree with that aspect of “fast”, but people should try to avoid failure if they can, rather than jumping immediately to declare defeat and move on to a sexier prospect. Fail safely or, at least, smartly. Know what the risks are, disclose them to those who are taking them, and be prepared to address failures that occur. There are cases where chronologically fast failure are appropriate, and there are times when it is not. Largely, the ethics of this come down to what risks the involved parties have agreed to take. People who invest in a startup accept the risk of losing the entire investment in a good-faith business failure, but they don’t accept the risk that the founder will just give up or do something overtly unethical with the money (bad-faith failure). Employees in startups accept the risk of losing their jobs immediately, without severance, if the company goes out of business; but if they’re misled about how much runway the company has, they’ve been wronged.

The ethics of “fail fast” depend largely on the explicit and implicit contracts surrounding failure: how failure is defined, and how it is to be handled. These are conversations people don’t like having, but they’re extremely important. Failures happen. Often these contracts are left implicit. For example, a person who joins a five-person company accepts that if he doesn’t fit well with the project (because a startup of that size only has one project) his employment must end. More on that, being a founder means that one will be (and should be) fired immediately if one doesn’t work well with the rest of the team, just as being a elected official means one accepts the risk of being fired for being unpopular. On the other hand, a person who joins a more stable, large company, does so with the expectation of risk mitigation. Specifically, people join large companies with the understanding that being a poor fit for one’s initial project doesn’t mean leaving the company. The additional robustness of career is a primary incentive for people to join huge companies. Therefore, large companies that impede internal mobility, usually under pretenses of false objectivity in the performance review process, are deeply unethical and their reputations should be tarnished gleefully and often, in order to prevent others in the future from being blown up by undisclosed risks.

The “fail fast” mantra implies that failure is hard, and that it takes a certain fortitude to look failure in the eye and accept the risk. Alone, that’s not hard. Lying down is easy. Quitting on someone else’s risk and dime is not hard. Letting people down is not hard. The hard part is communicating risks as they actually are to people before they get involved, finding people willing to take those risks, working as hard as possible not to let people down, and working even harder to help everyone recover from the loss should failure occur.

Stop writing about success and start writing about failure.

The internet, especially in the entrepreneurial blogosphere, seems to have an order of magnitude more people producing literature about success (i.e. “success crack”) than actually succeeding. Every day I see the peddlers of reckless optimism swarming Hacker News with dangerous naivete about entrepreneurial pursuits. Don’t get me wrong: startups and self-employment are great, but people should be aware of the risks and pitfalls, which too many people gloss over. This isn’t limited to startups; every sector of business has its own cottage industry of how-to manuals for breakout success, usually chock full of unrealistic promises (which, I guess, lends credence to their authors being successful in business, such promises being the currency of their world). Is this “fake it till you make it” syndrome on the part of the “crack” peddlers? I’m not so cynical as to suspect that. Blog posts and books about “success” are written by well-intended people who want to share insights they’ve had about life and about their own successes. The problem is that their insights are rarely very deep. You have to lose in order to get a sense of what’s really happening in the world.

I’ve designed games before, and when I play-test, I strongly prefer to lose. Why? No one likes losing, not even me (and I play so many board and card games that I ought to be used to it). When I lose at my own game, it’s even more harsh. But it’s the (very mild) embarrassment and emotional unpleasantness associated with losing that gives me insight into design flaws that I would overlook as a happy-go-lucky, full-of-himself winner. For a game designer, it’s a blessing to lose. If I feel like I deserved to lose, I know the rules that contributed to my loss are good. If I lose because of a bad rule, it’s a double-loss (I lost the game, and my rule sucks) but the “bug” in my design gets squashed before the next release. Every game is fun for the winning player, but if it’s not fun for the losing player– or if not “fun”, at least enticing enough to make her want to improve her skill and become better– it’s a mediocre game. Thus, losing is a boon for the insight it provides to a game’s designer. It’s the only way the designer can develop certain insights into the character of the game. The same’s true of life.

A very small set of people, just on account of the planet’s immense size, have untarnished track records of success and never develop the desire to look deeper into the processes that led to their outcomes. With six billion people in the world, the existence of champion coin-flippers is a statistical guarantee. Many people desperately want to be like those perennial winners, which is why such peoples’ optimism is so appealing, even inspiring, to others. Far more people than that (in fact, almost everyone, including most of the “success crack” vendors) get a fair mix of failures and successes. The problem is that failures are embarrassing and under-reported, while the successes are magnified to outlandish proportions. In 1999, at the height of the technology boom when “everyone” was getting rich, how many technology companies actually did IPOs? 5,000? 100,000? Two in every garage? Nope. A few hundred, with the precise number varying depending on how one defines “technology company” but uncontroversially under 1,000. Also, many recent years had less than 100.

Success crack is harmful, because it leads both to ill-considered efforts and too-early discouragement. It makes success look easy, but not in the conventional sense, because aside from Tim Ferriss, few of its peddlers actually argue that their success comes without hard work. The problem with success crack is that it seems to believe “work hard” and “work smart” are enough, as if being intelligent and putting in 10 hours a day, six days per week, suffice to lead to break-out success. That’s not true. People have to prepare for adversity, uncertainty, discouragement, and a high likelihood that, even if they do everything right, they’ll fail. These dangers are virtually guaranteed to a person undertaking anything interesting. That’s not a pleasant thing to hear, but it’s reality.

One observation I’ll make is that, when the locus of control is internal, one generally learns more from one’s successes than from one’s failures. An example is music practice: playing an instrument incorrectly is damaging to one’s long-term performance, because it reinforces bad habits. Playing it correctly, and experiencing the “click” when it sounds perfect, is when learning occurs. The same pattern I noticed in high school with contest math (e.g. AMC, USAMO): I would learn more when I solved a problem, even if I couldn’t solve it within the alloted time or made a mistake and got the wrong answer, than when I failed to solve it and had to read the solution. In these arenas, success teaches more than failure, and consequently, the best thing one can do when one wants to become better at the craft is to find the most successful people and learn from them.

When the locus of control is largely external, such as in most workplaces where one’s success or failure is largely a function of how one’s work and ability are perceived, not what they actually are, the opposite becomes true. More is learned through failure than through success, as those who succeed rarely peer into a system’s dysfunctions and discover the pitfalls. This is why, whenever I take a new job, I always make sure to quietly befriend the person at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This is only mildly motivated by an altruistic sense of wanting to help the omega pup, and there’s a purely selfish reason for my doing this: in terms of office politics, he actually knows what’s going on. And if you befriend him, he’ll tell you. His report may be biased and bitter, if not unduly negative, but it’s also the most insightful and, if not always accurate, the most precise. Apply appropriate filters, but listen to what he has to say. In any organization, the least popular person is the most knowledgeable about its character. Learn from him.

Most of the notions of achievement we develop in childhood come from a time in which success is largely objective and one’s success is derived from an internal locus of control: music practice, athletics, contest math. Even in schools, with their often-decried (and greatly exaggerated, since even high schools are utopian compared to the average corporate workplace) emphasis on obedience at the expense of creativity, a student’s success is primarily a function of intellectual talent and his or her work ethic. Deadlines are well-tested, people are working on similar projects, and people in authority (e.g. teachers) are required to grade fairly and can lose their jobs if they don’t. There are, of course, some students who get bad grades because they run afoul of professors’ idiosyncratic prejudices but, by far, the most common cause of bad grades (I say this having earned a few, and having deserved almost all of them) is mediocre work. Therefore, in childhood and adolescence, learning from the most successful is an excellent strategy in order to become better.

However, the “real world” is far more interdependent and capricious, and it’s nearly impossible to succeed without convincing others that one deserves the resources necessary to try– and competence and the ability to sell oneself to others rarely occur in the same person. This is what no one wants to tell bright-eyed college students: that they’re about to enter a world where their success is likely to depend, in a serious way, on being given resources and opportunity by others, and that working hard and being smart are only marginally important. In fact, at the overkill levels seen in the best students at elite schools, intelligence and a strong work ethic can easily become social liabilities. Because the locus of control is so often external in the “real world”, peoples’ failures have more to teach us than their successes.

The fundamental problem with success crack is that, while it makes for engaging light reading, it’s written either by those who know the least about the world, having never been down in the muck, or (more commonly) by those who have suffered, but still wish to mimic the wide-eyed optimism of those who haven’t– it’s somewhat of a status symbol to believe, as an extremely fortunate person might, the world to be better than it actually is– and therefore censor out the unpleasant but important details they know but have expelled from consideration. Thus, we have a slew of terrible advice floating about such as “Do what you love, and the money will follow” that is accepted because it seems appealing in spite of being utterly untrue. Like some charismatic religions, it sounds pretty, and half of that is because the author is trying to convince him- or herself that he or she actually believes it: that desire to believe the incredible and wrong is a powerful force capable of motivating some of the world’s beautiful, but also utterly untrue, prose.

In this light, I hope to see more attention given to pitfalls and patterns to avoid, so that true learning may occur, and far less in the way of vague, feel-good directives about “success”.