A long time ago I worked for a Porn company. As someone who grew up orthodox Jew and turned secular later in life, I had to consciously reorient my moral compass regularly; When a recruiter for that company contacted me I suspended my knee jerked “no” reaction and asked myself “why?” - it’s not like I hadn’t watched porn occasionally (I later learned to avoid it, it’s basically sexual junk food), so what’s my problem supporting its creation? And if I do have a problem with it, where do I draw the line? participating in a movie was an obvious “no”, but would I work for a company that had Porn companies as clients? pragmatically and morally it was an obvious “yes” for me - somewhere between these were my boundaries. When you do these kind of mind exercises, it soon becomes clear that practical applied morality (as opposed to abstract ideological morality) is very fluid. I ended up realizing I don’t view porn as morally problematic but rather as aesthetically problematic, so as long as my particular job was interesting and didn’t involve watching too much junk I was ok with it.

Campfire roasted Marshmallow is a childhood classic. Everybody knows what Marshmallow tastes like… Or do they? Because, as it turns out, Marshmallow doesn’t contain any Marshmallow!

Marshmallow confection was originally made from Marshmallow root (hence the name) but as food industry was moving to mass production the original recipe was changed to utilize widely available and cheap materials such as corn starch and gelatin; Marshmallow root was expensive and not available outside of Europe nor in large quantities. All that was left of Marshmallow root in the recipe was the name, and after so long no one even remembers that Marshmallow is actually plant with a unique flavor.

In one scene of the classic “Alice in Wonderland” movie, Alice encountered cards painting rose bushes.

The fact is, miss: we planted the white roses by mistake. And, the queen, she likes them red. If she saw what we did, she’d raise a fuss and each of us would quickly lose his head.

Alice in Wonderland [source]

“No” is one of the most important yet underused word in our languages. It’s importance cannot be overstated, yet in our culture saying “no” is often considered a negative. Saying “no” is frowned upon, sometimes considered rude, unfriendly or even aggressive - and when you say “no” people get angry. As a result, some people are terrified of saying “no” and their inability to say “no” makes them a danger to themselves and everyone around them. This may sound outrageous to someone who is conditioned to thing that “yes” is helpful, cooperative and positive and “no” is unhelpful, uncooperative and negative; However, like so many things people take for granted once you give this some deep thought it becomes very obvious that “common sense” just isn’t.

When I was a small boy I used to spend hours playing the “war” card game. The thing about this game is, it’s totally predictable and deterministic - each player gets a shuffled half of the deck and cards are extracted one by one in order. No chance or skill involved whatsoever and the result is completely determined by the pack you were dealt - we could just as well determine the winner by a coin toss. It really is a stupid game when you think about it, assuming you value games where the result can be influenced. But as kids, we didn’t understand it nor cared and so it was a really fun game; we would sit for hours and see how the decks play out, with every bit of the emotional rollercoaster adults have watching or playing games of the more sophisticated variety. The Buddhists might say life itself isn’t so different: we should let go of our illusions of control and just relax and enjoy seeing the decks play out; viewed in this sense I now find the game highly educational. Unfortunately, some of the lessons of the game do not appear to have taken hold in the general population nor in government circles. Take professional sports for example. Whenever an Israeli athlete happens to win a medal - say a silver olympic medal in some esoteric field like Judo or sailboard - the news is filled with politicians calling for an increase in sports budget citing how “investment will lead to more medals”. Sounds logical right? except it isn’t. No amount of money will significantly change the outcome, and it should be pretty clear to everyone involved. Top performance in professional sports is basically outliers, people who have abnormal genetics and abnormal life styles. Thus a country’s performance in the olympic games is dictated by the size of its population (more people, more outliers), the genetic composition of the population (East Africans will dominate running events, it’s just the way it is) and methods used for training and conditioning (legal and illegal). Note that the methods of training and conditioning are widespread and everybody converges on them, so you can only gain a few years lead at best. So unless you change the genetic composition of the population or the population size, there’s really nothing you can do to improve your results - except of course, importing already proven athletes from abroad; Unsurprisingly many “Israeli” sports champions are, well, not Israeli. Note that while you cannot improve the results you can easily degrade them, by not drawing athletes from the population as is the case in India - they simply don’t care enough about olympic medals to draw outliers from their vast population. But with a population that is just 0.125% of world population, there is only so much you can do. So what’s the point investing in national sports teams? there isn’t one, you might as well toss a coin - just like war card games; or you could relax and enjoy the show.

In Israel it occasionally happens that someone declares himself “king of the Jews”, “messiah” or even the “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” - it’s quite common and has been dubbed the “Jerusalem Syndrome”. We have quite a few of these prophets, along with a healthy supply of self proclaimed gurus, rabbi’s and cult leaders with their respective followers. We also have a horde of state endorsed religious nutcases (Israel does not have separation of church and state) with varying degrees of psychosis. Faced with absurd claims for divine ordination, it’s easy to take those titles with a grain of salt; yet for some reason this logic seems to be forgotten when you hear about the “King of Sweden”, “Lord”, “Sir” or the “Duke of York”… suddenly people attach meaning to those self proclaimed or state endorsed titles. Faced with these people, claiming to somehow be “better” than everyone else - through merit of lineage, historical fluke or a certificate by another delusional person - one particular answer seems highly appropriate:

One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a re-branding of HR. With the amount of conversations, conference talks and hype going on around talent, you would expect people will have an answer to the question “what is talent?”. You’d expect, and you’d be wrong: “it’s like porn, you know it when you see it” is the answer I usually get - and as with porn, this only conveys that the word is merely an unhelpful judgemental label. If you cannot give some attributes of “talent”, how are you going to find it, develop it, keep it? Also, it’s not as if the subject of talent hasn’t been researched - quite the contrary! Although research is far from being exhaustive of the subject (or anything related to intelligence for that matter), there is plenty we do know. As it turns out, most of what we hear about “talent” in the software industry is just plain wrong and based on naive and deprecated models if not outright self delusions. For example, Joel Spolsky has observed years ago that almost all companies are somehow convinced they hire only the top 1% of developers - a clear case of selection bias. When people tell me they want to hire the top 1% of developers, I laugh. First because as Joel Spolsky noted everyone says that. Second, it implies we have some measurement of developers abilities - if we had that, why are we working so hard on interviews? Third, do they mean “top 1% of the population” of developers or the developers with top 1% of the skill scale? they are not the same. Fourth, it assumes that skill is static and when they hire a top 1% developer she will remain a top 1% developer - in other words that performance is dependent only on the identity of the developer.

One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work as done”. This doesn’t happen over night of course, but rather a slow process - and I found it has a lot to do with the shift from doing and experiencing to planning and monitoring. In many ways, this is a shift from intuition based thinking to analytic type II “slow thinking” which is very different and requires very different ways of working. Unfortunately, most managers don’t get this and continue using their intuition instead of formal models when conducting planning and monitoring - with disastrous results. This isn’t an argument against intuition or analysis, but one should be aware which method they are employing and act accordingly. As an example, it is interesting to explore the stark difference between estimates on individual level where intuition works very well and on the team/group level, where our intuition fails.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates - and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data? if we can’t estimate well how did we decide if a gap is wide enough to jump over, if an animal is worth the hunt, if a certain area is more likely to have water and shade? Without estimation skills we wouldn’t survive. So what’s going on?