[zubspace]

I also thought about this a lot. Some things about slow thinking are great. I truly believe that it helped me thrive as a software developer.

But social interactions are awkward. I can't really come up with things to say easily and lots of times I can't respond in ways to keep the conversation going. Only after the fact I get lots of ideas of what I could have said. I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.

I'm a tad older, so I stopped caring about it and just accepted my slow thinking. But I'm sure that I also missed out on a lot of opportunities regarding friendships or work. I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.

Funnily my wife is completely opposite to me and we have the greatest time.

[Swizec]

> I'm truly impressed about others who can just come up with interesting or funny things to say on the spot.

As Winston Churchill once said when asked “what are you doing” –> “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

I’m one of those weirdos who does public speaking sometimes. Even 8 hour workshops. You cannot prepare for an 8 hour speaking engagement. Not really. But you can accumulate a plethora of anecdotes, metaphors, and remarks that you weave into the narrative or in response to questions.

You can build frameworks that are similar to code. Prepared functions/coroutines/objects that you run in appropriate situations. Works pretty well especially in mentoring/teaching/consulting situations. This is also how comedians prep their sets.

The key is that things you say are new to the audience, but not to you. It can be the same metaphor you’ve fine-tuned over dozens of interactions. And the person you’re talking to thinks “Wow that guy is so quick on his feet, how did he come up with that so fast!?”

You can also spot this if you watch talks by popular presenters (Simon Sinek is a good example). You’ll notice the same 2 or 3 core stories getting polished and fine-tuned over years of talks and interviews.

[saghm]

When I was super young, I used to think my dad (who everyone I met seemed to think was extremely funny) had a huge repitoire of hilarious stories, but after a few years I noticed him repeating them and realized he just had a few specific ones that he would re-use with new people, like you mentioned. As someone who tends to be pretty slow to learn how to navigate new social situations, it was eye-opening when I recognized this was something I could do. What's amusing to me at this point is that I'm still not sure he fully realizes that this is something he does sometimes, because he'll still sometimes try to whip out one of the stories when talking to me and then genuinely be surprised when I remind him of some very minor detail about it that he forgot to mention this time he told it.

[macrocosmos]

My dad recently told me a funny story about something that happened to him. Except it actually had happened to me and I had told him about it years before.

[thechao]

I recognize this in my self, so I usually preface the story saying something like "this may or may not have been me, but I'm telling it from the first person". First person stories are funnier. This is part of the "telling a yarn" or "tall tale" tradition I grew up with (in Texas).

[code_martial]

Better your Dad with a funny story than your boss with a victory tale!

[mordnis]

Heh, my wife was recently telling a story about how she taught our son how to run into a hug. She did not, I actually did, but I let her have it since she was so excited about it.

[bombcar]

There’s a Father Brown story which has the extreme of that: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/g-k-chesterton/the-secret-...

But in general yes - have a few or tens of stories you’ve rehearsed through long use, and practice ways to segue to one of them.

Once you get a handle for the few topics of small talk, it’s not terribly hard - and is a skill that can be taught and learned.

[rspeele]

Don't watch Big Fish unless you're ready to cry.

[mettamage]

Haha, this is my dad too. He doesn’t seem to realize it. It’s me as well. These are stories that tend to strongly relate to our identity. Like, if you get to know me I will talk about meditation or another story like me training with Wim Hof for an experiment at the Radboud Universiteit.

My username checks out :P

We relate to our own stories I guess.

[arjie]

Jeremy Vine once wrote a story about Boris Johnson which I thought was the pinnacle of this. It was published on his Facebook page and I've since lost the link, so you're going to have to read it on Reddit where someone has posted the whole thing again.

It is uproariously funny and very relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/c1korj/jeremy_v...

It tells the tale of how the man who was going to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used to play the improviser and ex tempore comedian, in a practiced and automatic way.

[bmaupin]

Here's the original: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20281420

[godelski]

  > “Oh just preparing my off-the-cuff remarks for tomorrow”

That actually reminds me something I head from Corridor Crew. Wren was referencing Brandon Laatsch (timestamped link to clip [0])

  | "Shower thoughts only work, when you put in the work." You have to actually spend time trying to brainstorm something, trying to think of something, and at the end of it you'll've made no progress and be discouraged. But then randomly, later, in the shower, doing something completely unrelated, the idea hits. 

It's weird, but I think it works. My best guess is that (part of this can be explained that) by spending time thinking about the solution space, your brain will then subconsciously start to generalize. Which would mean this is, to some extent, a trainable skill. I'm sure Churchill was also a master of moving conversations to topics or subtopics where he could more quickly make off-the-cuff remarks. But I think even the "slowest" person will recognize that they are much quicker in certain categories. Slowness might not mean they lack having thought about those topics, but might just mean they've thought less about quip remarks in that domain (or even quip remarks in general).

I think we would be naive to assume quick responses are a good measure of one's intelligence[1]. I know this is common, but I think it is missing the same thing that quick responses also tend to miss: depth. You can be fast and deep, but more often people are fast and wrong[2]. More complex the topic the easier it is to be unaware of how wrong.

[0] https://youtu.be/9FL7IZavt1I?t=93

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242293

[2] https://0x0.st/KcAU.png

[Edit] I wanted to add that I found this method highly effective during my PhD. It requires a balance of churning the wheels and walking away. Progress is invisible until the finish line is in sight, so you need to spend time pushing even if it looks like you are getting nowhere. But at the same time, you need to walk away. If you keep pushing you'll never have that time for those random thoughts. There's a laundry list of famous physicist[3] who used to "only work" for a few hours a day and then do things like go on long walks or play tennis. I think that fits into this model. It seems to be a critical aspect for any creative work. Honestly, I would find that the most common mistake I would make is sitting at my desk for too long. It results in a narrowing of focus. There's a lot of times we want that narrowing, but there's also plenty of times we want to think more broadly. I think this is very true for programming in general. I can sympathize with managers who look at people doing these things and interpret them as being unproductive. But I think the reality is that productivity is just a really hard thing to measure when you're not a machine stamping out well defined widgets. I think this ends up with us just making fewer "widgets" and of lower quality. I mean it isn't like you can measure quality by anything as simple as the number of lines of code or number of Jira tickets knocked off. Hell, if you are too narrow your solutions are probably creating more tickets than you're knocking off! But that's completely invisible, only measurable post hoc, and even then quite difficult to measure (if not impossible).

We often talk about current "titans" and all of them boast their long hours and "dedication." People like Elon suggesting 120hrs or the growing 996 paradigm. But I'm unconvinced this really checks out. If anything, it appears much more common that Nobel scientists worked fewer hours, not more. We're all not working on Nobel level work, but it does beg the question of what the most effective strategy actually is. Certainly we can't conclude longer hours at the desk yields better output. We can't counterfactually conclude that Dirac would have been even greater had he spent 16 hrs a day working rather than a handful. "More hours" just seems to be a naive oversimplification, highly related to these "shower thoughts"

[3] Dirac is a famous example, who colleagues would also jokingly use the unit "Dirac" in reference to "one word per hour". Notoriously "slow" thinker, but a surefire candidate for one of the smartest humans to ever exist. Poincare famously worked 10am till noon then 5pm till 7pm. Darwin followed a similar model.

[johntarter]

People like Elon suggest 120 hrs or 996 for the employees that work under him implementing his ideas-- the people rolling up their sleeves and putting hammers to nails. Most of the people in an org do not need to be involved in deep level thinking.

[godelski]

  > nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week
  - Elon[0] 

Yet... I listed a few... He goes on to suggest 80 is good with spikes into 100. I mean Elon is notorious for putting in those long hours himself[1], but he's definitely wrong in the quote.

So... who do you think those demands are for? He seems pretty clearly to be demanding it from engineers to execs. That also matches the experience of everyone I've known to have worked at SpaceX, including both programmers and aerospace engineers. Same with Tesla.

Also, thought I'd drop a link to this 996 HN post from the other week[2].

Honestly, I'm not sure who you're referring to, because when not taken literally that would seem to cover literally every employee.

[0] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1067173497909141504

[1] https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/my-workload-went-f...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45149049

[TheOtherHobbes]

Elon does this because being able to order all those people around makes him feel special and important, not because it actually works.

Study after study proves that productivity drops off rapidly when people are tired and stressed - which should be common sense, but apparently it's too common for some of our notables to understand.

So instead of actual work output you get productivity theatre. Everything is dramatic and shouting happens, but - for example - Tesla still doesn't have anything resembling FSD while more modest companies are much further along.

It's juvenile machismo, not adult management.

[varjag]

Musk's use of social media and his involvement in recreational activities is way too much for 80h/week. He's clearly more of a 4 day workweek type tho shy about it.

[corytheboyd]

I once had the opportunity at a comedy festival to see John Mulaney’s same set twice, and it’s pretty wild to see with your own eyes.

[everfrustrated]

In a way it shows what a craft it is to not only have jokes but also be able to present them again and again in a way that appears fresh.

Being a comedian is hard not because writing jokes are hard but because it's actually an intersection of a number of hard skills that require a LOT of practice to hone.

[nradov]

Why would it be wild? Very few live performances of any type are pure improvisation.

[Insanity]

Because of how formulaic it is?

[malnourish]

Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes? I struggle with sharing anecdotes that have an "Aesop", or directly relatable point, even if I've lived such experiences.

[Swizec]

> Do you have any advice for accumulating and sharing relevant anecdotes?

For me blogging for the past 15 or so years has been the secret ingredient. I regularly sit down and distill things into an approachable form then send off to my audience to see if it lands. If yes, I mentally add to my reference list. If not, I engage in some clarifying back-n-forth and try again next time.

These days in a more leadership position I get a lot of reps of this synchronously as I work with younger or less experienced folk.

[Kiboneu]

I also often don’t have timely responses.

There are sometimes long pauses before my response or even mid-speech, during which I’m thinking about what’s said. But the delay is often interpreted as a cue for someone else to respond or change the subject, which often leads to not being able to say anything that i’ve spent so much glutamate to process.

I used to say “one moment” every 5 seconds while I think, but that was distracting.

Sometimes, I do this thing with my eyes jumping them around as if I’m reading a book; that gives people something to look at while they wait, like a spinner indicator.

[everfrustrated]

As as over-thinker myself something I didn't appreciate until too late in life is the necessity of practice.

If you want to be able to hit a ball it doesn't matter how much thought you put into it - the learning is all about programming your lower instinctive brain and it only has the input device of repetition. This brain level has the ability to work at much lower latency - which is critical for reactive physical tasks.

I suspect it is the same here. You can certainly learn to speak using different levels of your brain as well. Case in point public speaking - the reason this is hard is generally you have to trust your mouth on automatic mode to follow behind and using the thinking part of your brain to better plan (or remember) ahead to build a narrative path.

[mat_b]

There are body language cues that show you are thinking. Try looking up (like you're looking into your brain).

[Kiboneu]

Yeah. That does work. I do that sometimes, though my eyes start to hurt when I roll them up for that long.

I also find it easier to do something with my eyes than to do nothing while thinking. That’s probably just me.

In the future, I might want an led embedded in one of my temples, that will blink like a network switch port or hdd light that indicates brain activity.

[conductr]

Also filler text while you think is good to practice. “That’s actually a well informed question, what I’ve seen is….” Buys you 5 seconds if you can say it on autopilot and think while your mouth is moving

[JSR_FDED]

I worked with a guy who would always start with “to a first approximation…”

After a while it started to grate on me because it came across as “here comes my poorly formed first thought”

[conductr]

lol, yeah the trick is to use them as sparingly as possible and have a dozen or so to rotate. I'm not sure if I qualify as a slow thinker the way OP and some others here are discussing it. But, I do frequently need more time to answer complex problems. I've also started just feeling OK telling people I can follow up with them on certain questions as it's too complex to answer off top of my head. As with anything, it's a balance, I find if you can't answer simple questions people will lose confidence in your answers.

[jononor]

That is a hilarious bodymod. And considering that is is possible to get rough brain activity indicators in a non-invasive manner, something like it could actually be made.

[noir_lord]

To an extent it’s a skill you can practice if not learn.

By nature I’m a slow thinker but I can mode switch if I need to but it’s exhausting after a while in a weird way I put it down to working in the trades before switching to programming full time, some of the fastest funniest people you’ll ever meet are tradesmen on job sites (introversion doesn’t mean poor social skills after all though they get conflated).

If you are generally happy as you are don’t sweat it, be a boring world if we where all the same.

[efsavage]

I am also the slow-thinking dev married to a quick thinker, and it's a good pairing. I know couples where they're both quick thinkers and things are so mercurial it's hard to believe they're still together, but maybe the excitement keeps it going.

I enjoy watching Harry Mack videos on YouTube where he freestyles and can work in something that happens like someone walking into the frame into literally the next line of his raps. This capability is so absolutely outside of the realm of possibility for my brain I almost feel like he's a different species.

[HellDunkel]

I‘m very similar. I noticed that people who are very easy to speak to share one trait: they have no shame to tell you the same story multiple times. It bores the hell out of me every times. If i try to do it, i get bored as well.

[djtango]

My boxing coach once described fighting as a conversation. I am inclined to agree.

In boxing you don't have the luxury of taking your time to think otherwise you get punched in the face.

Improving at conversation is like boxing - it can be reduced into structures and scenarios. Combinations and responses can be drilled in. Ultimately once the foundations are bedded in there is plenty of room for self expression and creativity.

The funny thing about social interaction is that we all talk to each other but there are people who live breathe and hone the art whether formally or informally while plenty of us just stumble along doing just good enough...

[Poomba]

>> I still think, that others perceive me as awkward or just not fun and it's hard to just ignore that.

Most likely they don’t care as much as you think. They are probably thinking about what they should say next

[conductr]

Due to this, career success is going to be highly dependent on chosen profession. Some professions are inherently more social and require heavy networking. Software and engineering as a whole, is a good profession for slow thinkers to excel. It can also be meritocratic so any personality quirks or pedigrees get normalized when ranking by performance.

[jonotime]

For me is has been quite the opposite. Im a top performing senior/staff engineer. But always struggle to get through coding interviews.

[conductr]

I'm self taught programmer, I don't code professionally but feel confident that I can build any software related widget I ever dreamed up. That said, coding interview stuff I have seen is like gibberish and I don't see how it correlates to the day to day job of building software. Maybe some types of software (lower level systems stuff and such come to mind). It seems like everyone online discussing it feels about the same too. So honestly not sure if that's signal or noise for you, lol.

[vim-guru]

I could have written these exact words. Marriage needs a certain balance you know ;)

[ozgrakkurt]

I think this is not really a bad trait. If you think about it from the other person’s perspective, they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them

[stronglikedan]

> they really don’t expect you to make jokes or entertain them

Oh, but they do, if you want to have future conversations with them. As a slow thinker with the same social issues as OP, trust me, they do. Nobody wants to keep talking to someone they consider boring, and first impressions are still the most important impressions.

[ozgrakkurt]

As someone who believed both versions of this in different parts of my life, I’m pretty convinced that it is a choice to believe in either one

[carabiner]

You're pretty much hosed for any FAANG leetcode interviews, though. Unless you're a superstar performer otherwise.

[anthonypasq]

you can try getting into improv comedy to develop this sort of skill. I'm also generally a slow thinker, but i dont actually think we think slower, I think we have too high a barrier for what we allow ourselves to say. We're afraid of making a mistake or saying something stupid, but most people just blurt out the first thought that percolates from their subconscious.