Managing Upwards: Beware if he LARPs as a Scientist
Your manager may be using you in an experiment, his manager may not care
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In tech, you meet many interesting people.
Some wanted to be an astrophyscist when they grew up, but a few years into their post-doc they realized they wanted to make money.
Some spent years in academia, only to clue in that they probably weren’t going to win a Nobel. Their family didn’t care either, they just wanted to go on vacation.
Many are extremely intelligent people who happened to come to terms with the fact that their chosen field did not pay.
Tough luck.
Notably, as evidence to what I’ve been saying since the beginning, learning how to code does not require you to have been coding as a kid or even in college.
You can apply yourself and learn anytime.
But, this isn’t a story about how those with a science background can break into the tech industry. Just read the post and you can have your first job offer in a few months:
No, this post is about when your manager or colleagues starts LARP-ing as a scientist.
Your manager may have been a scientist in their past career, but it is a fatal mistake to start LARP-ing as one.
And an even bigger mistake for you, anon, to not realize the carnage that can flow from their experiments and playing God with human lives.
Stay alert. Don’t be surprised when the inevitable happens. Avoid the blast radius.
Aloof Behaviorism
For anyone who slept through Psych 101, the Behaviorists emerged as a psychological movement in the 1900s. The likes of John B. Watson, B.F. Skinner, and Ivan Pavlov (yes, of the dog) pioneered many new ideologies for how animals and humans could be trained.
One of the more notable experiments which developed the concept of Classical Conditioning was “Pavlov’s dog”.
The dogs would salivate at the sight of meat. Pavlov started to ring a bell when he brought the meat out. After enough times, the dog’s would start salivating at the sound of the bell, without even seeing the meat.
This led to varying published techniques of “conditioning” a response given stimuli.
Neat dog science.
But, start assuming this can easily be applied to humans and you can start making horrific decisions.
Behaviorist Parenting Gone Amok
Take for example a colleague. Clearly on the spectrum.
He thought he was a thoroughly innovative parent when he trained his toddler that daddy would pay him a coin anytime he found and brought a choking hazard instead of putting it in his little mouth.
And sure enough, the toddler did learn to bring my colleague acorns, dust bunnies, all sorts of little choking hazards.
And yet in the years that my colleague carried this out, and while telling us this story at work with a smug smile on his face – he truly was proud of his innovation, it had never occurred to him the fact obvious to many of us sitting there: coins are choking hazards too.
He didn’t believe us. He immediately pulled out his phone to look it up.
He thought the coin, if lodged, would simply flap like a valve in a pipe pinched on opposite sides, willfully ignorant to the imperfect shape of parts of the human body.
His smile soon dropped for a few minutes realizing the different life that could have been if his child had choked on the coins he dutifully gave him.
As his child grew up, he continued to take his experimentations further, even going so far as to create a fake currency to incentivize his kid to do chores and teach how the economy works.
Unsurprisingly, within a few years my colleague’s centrally planned prices and rewards resulted in over printing and he’s had to switch to real dollars since his fake currency blew up as did the wheelbarrows of Weimar German Deutschmarks.
His child had quickly learned how to start gaming the system (ie. dad), leading to too many fake dollars in circulation, and his wife getting worried about how much the son would soon be able to spend with them.
The child also soon lost, as many studies show, any intrinsic motivation to do chores now that he has been trained to only do them when a monetary reward is present.
Lucky for me, my interactions with said autist were limited to the lunch hour cafeteria table.
Scientist Director
In another job, the division director also was formerly from the sciences, and often humble bragged of having made it on some TV show when his experiment got noticed by local news.
Now as director of a division of over 100 engineers, he in classic “current year tech culture” fashion decided that the existing promotion and HR annual review processes were not rigorous enough to remove bias.
Managers could just choose their favorites to promote and whom they dislike to fire! Clearly unfair, the director thought.
So he spent most of a year workshopping and developing a new process, so convoluted and haphazardly rolled out that he had a near revolt from the engineers on his hands when he dumped it on them right before Christmas.
When concerns about the new process, and how it would similarly be useless at rooting out the innate ability for managers to steer the career outcomes of their minions, he was shocked, shocked I tell you at our cynicism.
He pushed the process through regardless.
Sure enough, layoffs came the following year and management above him swiftly ignored his process and paperwork and carried out orders for cuts where each manager or director saw fit.
The director was gutted and shocked. At least outwardly.
I was convinced he was simply so dishonest with himself of the coming layoffs and his eventual required role in it that, to calm his conscience, he created this entire new scheme to provide written reasoning to justify who should be fired.
Yet, obviously, there still ended up being countless steps in the layoff process where “bias” could, and would, slip in.
Being “liked” rules the day, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
If your manager didn’t like you, you could bet your name would somehow end up on a firing list, regardless of your work output.
A Machiavellian realist view of power politics within a bureaucracy would have served everyone better than thinking that some paperwork could absolve the entire chain of command of the coming required bloodshed by their hands.
But, the paperwork helped the scientist director sleep at night, so I guess there’s that.
Throw away bad mental models
Science minded people can easily fall into a trap.
They become so tantalized by the ideas and mental models of their mind that they, especially with age, slowly can convince themselves that reality actually adheres to their models.
Tried and tested parenting techniques to cultivate a sense of belonging and duty to the household, and letting participation in chores flow out from that? No, let’s privatize familial bonds with a new fiat currency and see what happens!
Staring yourself in the mirror to admit that you will have to make hard decisions of who to promote and fire? No, let’s create a lot of paperwork and then, ah well, the process worked and the chips fell where they may.
If you find yourself falling into this trap often, being shocked by events in your life, it might be time to admit that you enjoy being in your head too much.
Find ways to ground yourself in reality, no matter how harsh it currently is.
The only way out is through.
Staying in your head is a sure way to be surprised when you get plowed down by a train with your headphones on because you convinced yourself that this set of tracks was unused because they were rusty. In the hospital or after-life you might realize the fault in your assumption, that even active train tracks often have a rusty patina to the steel rails.
If you don’t find yourself too surprised by what life throws at you, congratulations. Truly, you are already ahead of most people, who become a perpetual pointing soyjack shocked by easily predictable events which they ignore the possibility of to protect their feelings.
Unfortunately, unless you’ve got your wifi-money and escaped, you will probably end up working or be managed by delusional science minded people. Use these stories to update your mental models of just how far they can will themselves to jump off the cliff before admitting that it’s a long way down.
Avoid the carnage that flows out from their willful blindness.
Keep your paycheck. Build your wifi-money. Then escape.
In the coming weeks, I expect to land a major upgrade to KtSaaS which will include major improvements to the internal API auth architecture, working CI/CD with Buildkite, and best of all… drumroll… a working Selenium crawler.
This is a major leap forward for boilerplate functionality. Any website you can access with your browser can now easily be crawled to use in your new SaaS. Selenium has been an industry standard for years and the development experience in KtSaaS including full debugger within IntelliJ jacks up your development velocity.
As mentioned before, paid subscribers will get this and all future KtSaaS updates for free with their discounted licence. For further questions, you know where to find me on Twitter, my DMs are open.