It really depends on the role and the organization and where Kratsios is a degree in Political Science is going to be valuable. The role of CTO is not to be the most technical person in the room, but rather to lead the most technical people in the organization. This requires technical acumen, but more so requires good communication and leadership skills.
Management is only one part of a CTO's job. An effective CTO needs to have strong technical acumen, so that they know what to prioritize, who to empower, and how to effectively communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders and partners. In addition, they need to have credibility in the eyes of the technical teams they lead. This usually comes in the form of past technical accomplishments, but can also be fulfilled via strong credentials, depending on the organization. In the case of Pentagon, which is a very formal organization, credentials will be absolutely necessary, which is why I think this guy is going to be... not very effective at his job.
I have seen great tech leaders without a STEM degree. But they have a deep understanding of technology people, technology development as a process, and technology as a business. I have seen would-be tech leaders who tried to take shortcuts. They end disastrously.
Usually the problem boils down to judgment. They cannot tell who is producing the core value of the enterprise. They create unnecessary work. They add useless process. They have bizarre and unworkable ideas for products. They don't understand how to correctly price talent, and to retain it. They don't have the humility to know what they don't know. They overestimate how much they add to the enterprise.
The good people end up jumping ship and they are left with a rump of pure mediocrity, if anything at all.
How many CFOs do you know that have a degree in Computer Science? Specialization is important in engineering for the same reason it is in finance (and not a lot of engineers are picked as CFO). Engineers _could_ be good at it, but it kind of shows a laughably shallow understanding of finance to think that would work as a rule rather than an exceedingly rare exception.
„ These softball questions seem too easy, so when I first started asking them, I had to admit that I really expected everyone to sail right through them. What I discovered was that everybody solved the problem, but there was a lot of variation in how long it took them to solve.
That reminded me of why I couldn’t trade bonds for a living.
Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture.
And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.“
“ The person he’s replacing, Michael Griffin, holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and served as a NASA administrator. Indeed, Kratsios will be less academically credentialled than most of the program-managers he oversees. So how did he get here?”
It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. If I’m a director who was hired into the culture when that mattered, and now I’m several steps under a boss who flouts that, that’s a huge upsetting culture change.
Now luckily, he’s only going to be in this job for a few months so the damage will be largely mitigated, but still. This is an idiots game and it doesn’t make us smarter for trying to nit it to being acceptable. It’s not.
> It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree.
Apply this principle to elite-university admissions, big-tech hiring, or to developed-country citizenship and see how far you get with it.
Assuming Kratsios does not have experience already in doing so at Clarium: the problem will be -- when there is a dispute of opinion at the pentagon and two Ph.D.s with decades of experience come in with vast amounts of experience, but opposing and irreconcilable opinions -- how will Kratsios decide? If he does not know, he will need staffers; how will he judge the quality of the staff and their competence? Repeat this for the dozens of very big decisions he will be making, and the many dilemmas he will resolve.
This is the trump administration you’re talking about. The 33 year old will just pick whatever choice he thinks his boss, the idiot in the White House, will like. That’s it.
Believing he has responsibility or competence to decide would be his biggest mistake. It wouldn't matter if he actually did have credentials, it's not the role of an executive to decide technical disputes.
Having independent knowledge and skills would enable him to discover when he is being lied to, and usually prevent the attempt.
But he has been installed to direct budget to certain parties outside government, and can probably succeed at that. He might have been installed to commit the DoD to continue delivering budget to those parties long after he has been dismissed.
A possibly relevant example. Bill Taylor was a generalist, described by a more technical computer scientist colleague as a "concert pianist without fingers". Through his position at NASA, he had the vision to fund Doug Engelbart's mouse project around the age of 30, which directly enabled the mother of all demos in '68.
I fear he has been put in place to “package a portfolio.” At his level of expertise, I see little else he could accomplish in the short time remaining.
For those curious, the full position name is Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering USD(R&E), a position in its first conception held by Vannevar Bush.
I‘m sure many will rush to defend him, because after all there are also bootcamps.
But no - we shouldn‘t. Sure there a people who obtain a PhD and haven‘t learned much. And there are those who are great engineers and have no formal education.
But in those cases, they have shown beyond doubt that they can study by themselves and they have also put in the work which is needed for a deep understanding of anything complex.
Now of course there are engineers who lack leadership or social skills. But there are also those who have that as well. And those should be picked. In a country of that size which easily produces them.
That’s exactly right. With zero track record of vision (especially compared to Bush), why would anyone expect this guy to be the right fit?
The Russian collusion may or may not be true, but it certainly seems like they’d be getting what they’d have wanted by constantly putting lackluster candidates with in all these positions.
Serious security risk. When he falls out of favor, likely in six months, what he knows becomes part of his “business portfolio.” If you think this has low probability, remember it’s probability * consequences that matters.
Holy shit. This is some absolutely astonishing levels of idiocy. Everyone want to know why a 33-year old was chosen? Because he can be controlled. Full stop.
I know this because it was something that became apparent to me when I was a young CTO. Any fully-qualified person, with experience, in their 40s-50s will not take enormous amounts of shit without throwing it right back. Younger, less experienced folks, will not jeopardize their "opportunity" and instead will shovel the shit down the latter. Young people will not push back and instead will seek to make their "sponsor" happy.
While it once hurt my ego to say it, I've come to terms with it, talent has shit all to do with opportunity, most of it is, if not all, is luck.
As is the case with any job, be good enough, be amenable enough, and work hard enough. Nobody wants to pay an idiot who's hard to deal with and holds entitled beliefs.
Not sure about this situation here with the DD, but I'm sure you can cut yourself some slack. Being good enough means exactly that: good enough. And then a dash of luck on top of that helps tremendously.
> Everyone want to know why a 33-year old was chosen? Because he can be controlled. Full stop.
That's probably a factor, though from every indication I've seen of the internal dynamics of this administration it's probably a bigger factor in the sales pitch of the policy entrepreneurs selling picks to the President than it is in the actual selection process. As I read it, the bigger reasons this administration chooses young allied ideologues for senior positions for which they lack the traditional credentials are twofold:
(1) They want allied ideologues that don't need to be controlled. If they could find qualified people with the right ideological credentials they wouldn't shy away from them, but they usually can't and the ideological credentials are the key indicator that people will make the “right” decisions without explicit control, and
(2) They want a long-term impact on shaping the nation, party, and broader conservative community and jumping members of their fairly narrow factions ahead in resume building this way means that in the next Republican administration, and in Republican/conservative think tanks, media networks, etc. in the meantime, their faction will be far ahead of where it was a few years ago in people with the the kind of resume that gets them positions.
> They want allied ideologues that don't need to be controlled
My first thought too. The older manager type isn't going to take shit, and may have their own agenda. A lot of my older managers (like Director/VP/CTO), be they in the Defense Contracting side, or corporate, were pushing contracts to their friends, or fighting personal or ideological battles.
I think the main reason is that young people can be paid less. They also don't realize that your pay is your take home divided by hours worked, and that if you are salaried and working 80 hours a week you are actually making half what you think you are making.
More experienced developers who actually have kept up with their skills are much better, but the fact is that a lot of the development work out there isn't at that level. A lot of it is just plugging and chugging Java, JavaScript, etc.
> Any fully-qualified person, with experience, in their 40s-50s will not take enormous amounts of shit without throwing it right back
I'm a 20-something occasionally put in a position where I have to antagonize people in leadership positions to make them change how they work. I'm a corporate IT leadership bad cop. You're right, it's much easier to do this with less experienced people - but on average I'd say age hasn't really made any difference. Younger people (<40) just tend to be less likely to get visibly pissed off when I question decisions they've made.
I suggest this might be some kind of survivor bias.
Any person on this kind of position who is not able to push back on the bullshit will likely to be burnt out by 40s-50s,so only the ones that acquired that skill are still around.
The post-mortem of this administration is going to be horrific. It may sound conspiracy-theoryish now, but if things play out how we've seen from so many other examples of bad behavior from this administration, I can't help but think we're going to end up having our most valued defense research secrets sold out to the highest bidder.
Elections have consequences, and the consequences of 2016 will be felt for a long time.
>>>>I can't help but think we're going to end up having our most valued defense research secrets sold out to the highest bidder.
That's not anything new. NYT, 1999: https://archive.is/GjzkI
"The certification was the first such notice to Congress under the law, which was passed in the aftermath of a Congressional uproar last year over the transfer of sensitive missile technology to China."
A degree doesn’t properly define the skills level of a person. Having some kind of a track record is a lot more helpful. Neither seem to be present (at the surface at least). The only thing that is present is a solid network.
Then again. That does seem to be the single most important asset one can have to get where they want to be.
From decades of experience, his is what I came to believe:
The best managers I met tended to be those that if the circumstance required it, could do the job of those two levels below. So they could actually do the job of the people that are managed by those they manage.
If you can't do the job of the people up to about three levels down the org chart at least at a basic level, you probably can't effectively manage the organization they are part of, either.
Now, it's true that there are lots of managers that have that problem even at one level down, but incompetent management is a widespread problem (especially because managers are often chosen by incompetent managers that believe that management is an independent and sufficient skill set without domain knowledge, either because they think you don't ever need domain knowledge because you can get by with generic management skills or because they think domain knowledge is easy to pick up by osmosis. The latter is true for a small minority of people—basically, the same people that, if they started with domain knowledge, management skills would be trivial to pick up—but neither is generally true.)
> Thiel has made a variety of enemies in the tech world and beyond; for example, he has slammed Google as being too accommodating to China.
You can tell the smart guys from the smart-sounding ones by looking closely at how good of an understanding of the real world they have, measured by how many true non-obvious predictions they make.
Paul Graham, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Peter Thiel score high. To grow ones understanding of the world one must be open, look closely, read those interviews and books, form your own opinion, without prejudice or partisan filters.
All of them are risk takers and public intellectuals. They are independently wealthy, none of them need the exposure or income from peddling certain ideas or catering to a certain audience.
I can't even tell which you one you mean, let alone for what reason.
I dunno, if someone was a flat-earther or an anti-vaxer I would be really uninterested in their opinions on pretty much anything because they're obviously batshit crazy. I don't see how being a raging racist is any more rational or any less damning to one's credibility than being a flat-earther or an anti-vaxer.
> if someone was a ___ or a ___ I would be really uninterested in their opinions on pretty much anything because they're obviously ___
Dismissing one’s ideas based on group membership is a terrible strategy for truth-seeking. It’s a root of all kinds of problems we see with team-based politics where both sides have turned their brain off and largely accept the entire slate of talking points their side serves up.
I had a flat-earthier as a roommate for about half a year. We had some detailed discussions about his beliefs, which was interesting since my time at the South Pole gives me personal experience that directly contradicts most of his beliefs. The guy clear had a very poor understanding of math (especially geometry) and physics (especially optics) but was a generally nice guy with a good head on his shoulders.
I would trust very ñittle he had to say about things outside of his direct experience, since his BS detector was apparently broken, but I would tend to trust his knowledge of things he had dealt with directly.
While I don't judge people for their ideological bent, I do judge them for uncritically accepting BS because it fits their ideological bent. This leads me to dismiss many of the knowledge and opinions of people who find themselves trapped in the ideological games played by our media.
Yes! This is so much more precise and productive, and stands in stark contrast to a blunt stereotyping heuristic. You're engaging in discussion, analysis, and identification of cognitive biases and memetic complex traps. Then applying all of that appropriately, understanding where you can and cannot trust a person's ideas, without categorically dismissing the balance of that person's ideas indefinitely.
I'm going to say that flat-earthing is a sort of dividing line for me. If somebody insists on flat-earth with a straight face, I'm going to ask them some questions. It's unclear that any flat-earther would be able to come up with answers that are reasonable, and I think it's reasonable to impute that the person's ability to be reasonable about other things is probably impeded.
This is an absurd argument. At the very least, science can absolutely provide conclusive evidence that the world is not flat and that vaccines cannot cause autism. This isn’t a “belief.” This can be shown with clear conclusive evidence. Religious beliefs cannot be tested due to how they are structured (“just gotta have faith”).
So even assuming you are arguing in good faith, an anti-vaxxer and/or a flat-earther are people who can be shown irrefutable evidence that goes against their beliefs and they will simply close their eyes, plug their ears, and scream and shout until you go away. The opinions of those people are ones I don’t care about or think worthwhile because they have already made up their minds and are working backwards to look for evidence that supports their beliefs, and invalidating all others.
I did not mean religious beliefs in general, just particular 'man in the sky' beliefs, which are as absurd as flat earth.
But somehow a bunch people who have such beliefs are smart and productive.
Instead of assuming that "surely every sane person" must share your point of view, can you point to specific accusations and sources that validate them? You might just convince someone you have actually a point, if your arguments hold up.
I assume you're talking about Thiel and maybe China, but still don't actually know.
Have you ever actually listened to any of Thiel's talks and the reasons why he takes particular stances? If you did you'd realize that his stances on things like China are related to geopolitics and economics, not race.
I cannot even begin to understand why stating something that is well known is considered flamebait?
Everyone knows Peter Thiel is a die-hard Trump supporter with a very strong anti-immigrant agenda, he has been a supporter of Apartheid and has strong ties to white nationalism. Why is stating any of this considered flamebait? I have given references in other comments.
Your reply OTOH is unsubstantive. I have noticed a pattern of unsubstantiated rebukes in many of your comments. You might be overloaded with moderation work and I recommend that you add new moderators.
AFAIK, Peter Thiel isn't even working with Y combinator anymore. @dang can you explain why there is this need for aggressive censorhip around Peter Thiel.
Here is the most upvoted comment that has not been rebuked by you
"Holy shit. This is some absolutely astonishing levels of idiocy. Everyone want to know why a 33-year old was chosen? Because he can be controlled. Full stop.
"
Its almost like you know that rebuking the most popular comment is going to gut your reputation as a moderator. So you go around looking for a comment that has more substance that attracted more negative votes because of timing and random chance and reply with rebukes and a link to the guidelines? I cannot for the life of me understand what the substance and logic of your rebuke was? Why were you triggered so badly? If someone thinks Peter Thiel has strong ties to white nationalism (with references to NPR and what not) they should not participate in this discussion forum, or at the very minimum stay silent about it? What is the end goal of the moderation here?
Why is every reply getting flagged? Can I have some answers - Why is a response that refers to the SPLC getting flagged? SPLC is a very well respected organization. Who is flagging this and how are my comments outrageous or flamebait? Who is even tracking and following up on this thread? Why so much investment here!
I don't know why users have been flagging your replies, but it's probably because you're posting so many off-topic procedural complaints, which is not very interesting.
I don't know what more to tell you about your GP comment. It's not as if this is a borderline call - it was an inflammatory one-liner. Starting a celebrity flamewar is tedious, especially when it's one that has been repeated countless times already.
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? This is a place for intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The more the rest of the world is consumed by the latter, the more we need to focus on the former here, or else HN will simply not survive. The whole idea of this place has been to stave that outcome off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That means we need to moderate comments like the ones you've been posting in this thread, so please don't post them.
Also: we've had to ask you multiple times in general to stop breaking the site guidelines, and unfortunately your commenting history shows many other cases of you doing this, with comments that are unsubstantive and/or unkind - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044862 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094678. Comments like that are bannable offenses on HN. If you keep breaking the rules we are going to have to ban you.
Please fix this by posting substantively and kindly from now on. Alternatively, it's always fine not to post.
If you have the connections to send a 33 year old without a science background to head research and engineering at the pentagon things coming true isn't a function of being smart or predicting anything but just being close to money and power.
Making things true by pulling your wallet or smartphone out of the pocket isn't exactly a good proxy for intellect.
Also ironically Taleb's most salient observation is that smart people should be very aware of the fact that the things that actually matter can't really be predicted at all.
The fact that Palantir wasn't stapled front and center as the catalyst for huge amounts of police abuse and corruption during the BLM protests is a testament to Thiel's position in the military industrial complex.
A general flaw in pure capitalism is the how quick companies break morals and principles to 'increase shareholder value'.
You have some of the richest CEOs in the planet who, in critical moments, cannot voice their true opinion. It's sad when leaders regurgitate 'safe' or bland comments in interviews.
That sort of denunciatory rhetoric is not substance; it's name-calling. That makes it against the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and taking the intended spirit of this site more to heart? We want curious conversation here.
Off the top of my head (and with no endorsement of related politics/ideology):
Paul Graham:
- That web-based apps were the future of software; the product that made him rich the first time around was Viaweb, the first ever web application, built in about 1995 when everyone else was selling thick-client Windows desktop apps in shrink-wrap boxes (http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html)
- That startups using niche languages like (in 2004) Python and Ruby would do better than those using mainstream platforms like Java and MS .Net (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)
- That startups were becoming dramatically cheaper/easier to start, and therefore could be started by fewer, younger people, didn't need "business people" early on, could get much further without needing to sell controlling stakes to VCs, and could effectively be mass-produced (http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html)
- That a team of founders who funded themselves by selling novelty breakfast cereal would build an amazing company, even if their idea seemed to suck (http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html)
- That a new, tech-focused news discussion forum, in a world that already had Slashdot and Reddit, could become popular and could remain popular for many years by employing specific mechanisms to raise the standards of content and discussion (http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)
Nassim Taleb:
- He explained the fundamental weaknesses in the economic system that would lead to crashes like 2007-08, and the present turmoil.
- Was predicting that a pandemic was the world's greatest risk at least 7 years ago (don't have time to sift through all the material but plenty is out there if you care to search for it)
Peter Thiel:
- Identified in 1993 that Silicon Valley offered more compelling career opportunities than NYC legal/securities work
- With Max Levchin, predicted that a money transfer platform would be one of the most important pieces of infrastruc...
Absolutely nobody hates meritocracies, and it's intellectually dishonest to claim they do. If you're referring to things like encouraging diversity or CoC's or the other usual things that some personality types REALLY enjoy getting worked up over, the people that advocate them advocate them because they want to establish better meritocracies in the face of implicit biases. Biases that stand in the way of meritocracies (similar to things like nepotism, etc.).
You can disagree with them that those biases exist, or that that is a way to accomplish a more perfect meritocracy, but you can't claim that they are motivated by a desire to make anything less of a meritocracy. You can only claim that they're going about it the wrong way and give really thoughtful and coherent reasons why you think that's the case.
>Absolutely nobody hates meritocracies, and it's intellectually dishonest to claim they do.
I'm not agreeing with the grandfather comment, but there are "post-meritocracy" movements[0] in the world that fall more in line with the opinion that meritocracy as a concept is flawed.
That link doesn't really dismiss meritocracy as a concept or ideal, it tries to call attention to flaws in the way that meritocracy is practiced (especially in open source projects.)
As a liberal democrat, my first feeling was outrage.
Then I saw how quickly he rose in Peter Thiel's organization which is impressive.
I started my career working in the defense industry (an early employee at SAIC, which much later changed its name to Leidos). I saw this scenario at least twice working in that industry: someone young and without the "right kind of degree" would get hired. They had great people and organizational skills and ended up being very valuable just because they got stuff organized, then done.
Kratsios may be a lacky, or a skilled organization-person. Or both.
We've banned this account for trolling. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
129 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 182 ms ] threadIt really depends on the role and the organization and where Kratsios is a degree in Political Science is going to be valuable. The role of CTO is not to be the most technical person in the room, but rather to lead the most technical people in the organization. This requires technical acumen, but more so requires good communication and leadership skills.
I view it as necessary, but not sufficient by itself.
Usually the problem boils down to judgment. They cannot tell who is producing the core value of the enterprise. They create unnecessary work. They add useless process. They have bizarre and unworkable ideas for products. They don't understand how to correctly price talent, and to retain it. They don't have the humility to know what they don't know. They overestimate how much they add to the enterprise.
The good people end up jumping ship and they are left with a rump of pure mediocrity, if anything at all.
It was about how in principle he can reason about markets, but it takes forever and „it all becomes very sad“. Or something like that.
edit: found it https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/recrui...
„ These softball questions seem too easy, so when I first started asking them, I had to admit that I really expected everyone to sail right through them. What I discovered was that everybody solved the problem, but there was a lot of variation in how long it took them to solve.
That reminded me of why I couldn’t trade bonds for a living.
Jared is a bond trader. He is always telling me about interesting deals that he did. There’s this thing called an option, and there are puts, and calls, and the market steepens, so you put on steepeners, and it’s all very confusing, but the weird thing is that I know what all the words mean, I know exactly what a put is (the right, but not the responsibility, to sell something at a certain price) and in only three minutes I can figure out what should happen if you own a put and the market goes up, but I need the full three minutes to figure it out, and when he’s telling me a more complicated story, where the puts are just the first bit, there are lots of other bits to the story, I lose track very quickly, because I’m lost in thought (“let’s see, market goes up, that mean interest rates go down, and now, a put is the right to sell something…”) until he gets out the graph paper and starts walking me through it, and my eyes glazeth over and it’s very sad. Even though I understand all the little bits, I can’t understand them fast enough to get the big picture.
And the same thing happens in programming. If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don’t even have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.“
It’s a big problem when you take people who shouldn’t be in a position and put them in it. It’s an even bigger problem when you do it in a place with a long history of pedigree. If I’m a director who was hired into the culture when that mattered, and now I’m several steps under a boss who flouts that, that’s a huge upsetting culture change.
Now luckily, he’s only going to be in this job for a few months so the damage will be largely mitigated, but still. This is an idiots game and it doesn’t make us smarter for trying to nit it to being acceptable. It’s not.
Apply this principle to elite-university admissions, big-tech hiring, or to developed-country citizenship and see how far you get with it.
Having independent knowledge and skills would enable him to discover when he is being lied to, and usually prevent the attempt.
But he has been installed to direct budget to certain parties outside government, and can probably succeed at that. He might have been installed to commit the DoD to continue delivering budget to those parties long after he has been dismissed.
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/taylor_more.h...
How is this nepotism? The article reports only that this is a well-connected individual that used to serve as Thiel's deputy.
But no - we shouldn‘t. Sure there a people who obtain a PhD and haven‘t learned much. And there are those who are great engineers and have no formal education.
But in those cases, they have shown beyond doubt that they can study by themselves and they have also put in the work which is needed for a deep understanding of anything complex.
Now of course there are engineers who lack leadership or social skills. But there are also those who have that as well. And those should be picked. In a country of that size which easily produces them.
The Russian collusion may or may not be true, but it certainly seems like they’d be getting what they’d have wanted by constantly putting lackluster candidates with in all these positions.
I know this because it was something that became apparent to me when I was a young CTO. Any fully-qualified person, with experience, in their 40s-50s will not take enormous amounts of shit without throwing it right back. Younger, less experienced folks, will not jeopardize their "opportunity" and instead will shovel the shit down the latter. Young people will not push back and instead will seek to make their "sponsor" happy.
While it once hurt my ego to say it, I've come to terms with it, talent has shit all to do with opportunity, most of it is, if not all, is luck.
Not sure about this situation here with the DD, but I'm sure you can cut yourself some slack. Being good enough means exactly that: good enough. And then a dash of luck on top of that helps tremendously.
That's probably a factor, though from every indication I've seen of the internal dynamics of this administration it's probably a bigger factor in the sales pitch of the policy entrepreneurs selling picks to the President than it is in the actual selection process. As I read it, the bigger reasons this administration chooses young allied ideologues for senior positions for which they lack the traditional credentials are twofold:
(1) They want allied ideologues that don't need to be controlled. If they could find qualified people with the right ideological credentials they wouldn't shy away from them, but they usually can't and the ideological credentials are the key indicator that people will make the “right” decisions without explicit control, and
(2) They want a long-term impact on shaping the nation, party, and broader conservative community and jumping members of their fairly narrow factions ahead in resume building this way means that in the next Republican administration, and in Republican/conservative think tanks, media networks, etc. in the meantime, their faction will be far ahead of where it was a few years ago in people with the the kind of resume that gets them positions.
My first thought too. The older manager type isn't going to take shit, and may have their own agenda. A lot of my older managers (like Director/VP/CTO), be they in the Defense Contracting side, or corporate, were pushing contracts to their friends, or fighting personal or ideological battles.
* It’s illegal and therefore people shouldn’t do it.
* It’s illegal because people shouldn’t do it.
* It’s illegal which raises the cost of doing it.
* Other?
Specifically, discriminating against someone over 40 due to age. (29 USC § 621: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/621 )
In what specific way is its legality relevant? The bare observation that it’s illegal doesn’t mean anything.
More experienced developers who actually have kept up with their skills are much better, but the fact is that a lot of the development work out there isn't at that level. A lot of it is just plugging and chugging Java, JavaScript, etc.
Huh? That's an ageist comment, and should not be acceptable.
I'm a 20-something occasionally put in a position where I have to antagonize people in leadership positions to make them change how they work. I'm a corporate IT leadership bad cop. You're right, it's much easier to do this with less experienced people - but on average I'd say age hasn't really made any difference. Younger people (<40) just tend to be less likely to get visibly pissed off when I question decisions they've made.
Any person on this kind of position who is not able to push back on the bullshit will likely to be burnt out by 40s-50s,so only the ones that acquired that skill are still around.
Elections have consequences, and the consequences of 2016 will be felt for a long time.
That's not anything new. NYT, 1999: https://archive.is/GjzkI "The certification was the first such notice to Congress under the law, which was passed in the aftermath of a Congressional uproar last year over the transfer of sensitive missile technology to China."
Then again. That does seem to be the single most important asset one can have to get where they want to be.
The best managers I met tended to be those that if the circumstance required it, could do the job of those two levels below. So they could actually do the job of the people that are managed by those they manage.
Now, it's true that there are lots of managers that have that problem even at one level down, but incompetent management is a widespread problem (especially because managers are often chosen by incompetent managers that believe that management is an independent and sufficient skill set without domain knowledge, either because they think you don't ever need domain knowledge because you can get by with generic management skills or because they think domain knowledge is easy to pick up by osmosis. The latter is true for a small minority of people—basically, the same people that, if they started with domain knowledge, management skills would be trivial to pick up—but neither is generally true.)
You can tell the smart guys from the smart-sounding ones by looking closely at how good of an understanding of the real world they have, measured by how many true non-obvious predictions they make.
Paul Graham, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Peter Thiel score high. To grow ones understanding of the world one must be open, look closely, read those interviews and books, form your own opinion, without prejudice or partisan filters.
One of them in this list is not like the others.
I can't even tell which you one you mean, let alone for what reason.
EDIT: I can't believe I have to justify what is public knowledge
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/03/50...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4...
Dismissing one’s ideas based on group membership is a terrible strategy for truth-seeking. It’s a root of all kinds of problems we see with team-based politics where both sides have turned their brain off and largely accept the entire slate of talking points their side serves up.
It also borders on the definition of bigotry.
I would trust very ñittle he had to say about things outside of his direct experience, since his BS detector was apparently broken, but I would tend to trust his knowledge of things he had dealt with directly.
While I don't judge people for their ideological bent, I do judge them for uncritically accepting BS because it fits their ideological bent. This leads me to dismiss many of the knowledge and opinions of people who find themselves trapped in the ideological games played by our media.
That's a majority of the worlds' scientists, teachers, politicians, and just about every profession.
So even assuming you are arguing in good faith, an anti-vaxxer and/or a flat-earther are people who can be shown irrefutable evidence that goes against their beliefs and they will simply close their eyes, plug their ears, and scream and shout until you go away. The opinions of those people are ones I don’t care about or think worthwhile because they have already made up their minds and are working backwards to look for evidence that supports their beliefs, and invalidating all others.
Have you ever actually listened to any of Thiel's talks and the reasons why he takes particular stances? If you did you'd realize that his stances on things like China are related to geopolitics and economics, not race.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
Everyone knows Peter Thiel is a die-hard Trump supporter with a very strong anti-immigrant agenda, he has been a supporter of Apartheid and has strong ties to white nationalism. Why is stating any of this considered flamebait? I have given references in other comments.
Your reply OTOH is unsubstantive. I have noticed a pattern of unsubstantiated rebukes in many of your comments. You might be overloaded with moderation work and I recommend that you add new moderators.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/03/50...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/461193-ann-coulter-pet...
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=rAQWX_WWJOLl9AOPr...
AFAIK, Peter Thiel isn't even working with Y combinator anymore. @dang can you explain why there is this need for aggressive censorhip around Peter Thiel.
https://fortune.com/2017/11/19/y-combinator-peter-thiel/
"Holy shit. This is some absolutely astonishing levels of idiocy. Everyone want to know why a 33-year old was chosen? Because he can be controlled. Full stop. "
Its almost like you know that rebuking the most popular comment is going to gut your reputation as a moderator. So you go around looking for a comment that has more substance that attracted more negative votes because of timing and random chance and reply with rebukes and a link to the guidelines? I cannot for the life of me understand what the substance and logic of your rebuke was? Why were you triggered so badly? If someone thinks Peter Thiel has strong ties to white nationalism (with references to NPR and what not) they should not participate in this discussion forum, or at the very minimum stay silent about it? What is the end goal of the moderation here?
I don't know what more to tell you about your GP comment. It's not as if this is a borderline call - it was an inflammatory one-liner. Starting a celebrity flamewar is tedious, especially when it's one that has been repeated countless times already.
Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? This is a place for intellectual curiosity, not political battle. The more the rest of the world is consumed by the latter, the more we need to focus on the former here, or else HN will simply not survive. The whole idea of this place has been to stave that outcome off for as long as we can: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... That means we need to moderate comments like the ones you've been posting in this thread, so please don't post them.
Also: we've had to ask you multiple times in general to stop breaking the site guidelines, and unfortunately your commenting history shows many other cases of you doing this, with comments that are unsubstantive and/or unkind - for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23044862 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094678. Comments like that are bannable offenses on HN. If you keep breaking the rules we are going to have to ban you.
Please fix this by posting substantively and kindly from now on. Alternatively, it's always fine not to post.
Making things true by pulling your wallet or smartphone out of the pocket isn't exactly a good proxy for intellect.
Also ironically Taleb's most salient observation is that smart people should be very aware of the fact that the things that actually matter can't really be predicted at all.
You have some of the richest CEOs in the planet who, in critical moments, cannot voice their true opinion. It's sad when leaders regurgitate 'safe' or bland comments in interviews.
Keeping their mouth shut and pandering to Trump, Saudi, China, et al, is exactly in service to those values.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Also, you've posted many such unsubstantive comments, and we eventually ban that sort of account.
https://www.theverge.com/21331900/peter-thiel-kris-kobach-ka...
Sounds like Thiel has had his daily top up.
So many interesting, fundamental topics.
You say this is measured by the number of "true non-obvious predictions" - can you list those for each of these folks?
I'd also think a batting average would be useful, instead of just a count of "correct predictions".
Paul Graham:
- That web-based apps were the future of software; the product that made him rich the first time around was Viaweb, the first ever web application, built in about 1995 when everyone else was selling thick-client Windows desktop apps in shrink-wrap boxes (http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html)
- That Yahoo was effectively a Ponzi scheme in 1998-99 (http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html)
- That startups using niche languages like (in 2004) Python and Ruby would do better than those using mainstream platforms like Java and MS .Net (http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html)
- That Bayesian filtering was a better approach to spam filtering (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)
- That startups were becoming dramatically cheaper/easier to start, and therefore could be started by fewer, younger people, didn't need "business people" early on, could get much further without needing to sell controlling stakes to VCs, and could effectively be mass-produced (http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html)
- That a team of founders who funded themselves by selling novelty breakfast cereal would build an amazing company, even if their idea seemed to suck (http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html)
- That a new, tech-focused news discussion forum, in a world that already had Slashdot and Reddit, could become popular and could remain popular for many years by employing specific mechanisms to raise the standards of content and discussion (http://paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)
Nassim Taleb:
- He explained the fundamental weaknesses in the economic system that would lead to crashes like 2007-08, and the present turmoil.
- Has made huge financial gains during each of the major financial market crashes of the past 35 years: 1987, 2000-2001, 2007-2008, 2020 (https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/bloombergProfile.pdf, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-08/taleb-adv...)
- Was on record suggesting a Trump win was more likely than most believed - https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/03/black-swan-author-nassim-tal...
- Was among the earliest raising the alarm about the Covid-19 pandemic https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1221486205847646208?lang=...
- Was predicting that a pandemic was the world's greatest risk at least 7 years ago (don't have time to sift through all the material but plenty is out there if you care to search for it)
Peter Thiel:
- Identified in 1993 that Silicon Valley offered more compelling career opportunities than NYC legal/securities work
- With Max Levchin, predicted that a money transfer platform would be one of the most important pieces of infrastruc...
Just out of curiosity, what else comprises the Peter Thiel portion of Silicon Valley?
This is funny because the left simultaneously hates meritocracy but slam it when it's problematic. Such intellectually dishonest people they are.
You can disagree with them that those biases exist, or that that is a way to accomplish a more perfect meritocracy, but you can't claim that they are motivated by a desire to make anything less of a meritocracy. You can only claim that they're going about it the wrong way and give really thoughtful and coherent reasons why you think that's the case.
I'm not agreeing with the grandfather comment, but there are "post-meritocracy" movements[0] in the world that fall more in line with the opinion that meritocracy as a concept is flawed.
[0]: https://postmeritocracy.org/ (sidenote: I agree with a lot of things in this link)
Your very next sentence goes on to disprove that.
Then I saw how quickly he rose in Peter Thiel's organization which is impressive.
I started my career working in the defense industry (an early employee at SAIC, which much later changed its name to Leidos). I saw this scenario at least twice working in that industry: someone young and without the "right kind of degree" would get hired. They had great people and organizational skills and ended up being very valuable just because they got stuff organized, then done.
Kratsios may be a lacky, or a skilled organization-person. Or both.
Is it because he’s a gay conservative?