[jp57]

I think one of the saddest thing is that the kind of person who would recognize, "we can solve this seemingly complicated problem by just applying this formula", would often have trouble even getting recognized in many corporate environments.

I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.

Every manager who'd ever directly managed him knew what a treasure he was, but it was often hard for us to convince others of the value of his solutions because they were so simple, and people were convinced that hard problems must have complex solutions. (or else they would have solved them, right?)

He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.

[eru]

> I managed a guy like that. He was capable of very complex thinking, but he wasn't in love with complexity, he was in love with simplicity. His solutions tended to be of the form, "we can ignore all these things, and just focus on X, and it will provide all the value." He'd notice something and simplify it and the benefit to the company would be measured in multiples of his salary.

I did some of that a few times in my life. But I also realised that a large part of the value I brought was not necessarily in coming up with the solution, but in convincing the rest of the company---and in training up enough of the rest of the team to understand and maintain the system.

For example at Goldman, I used an integer linear programming solver to re-shuffle how we assigned compute capacity in different data centres to various departments and how to compute fail-over plans ahead of time.

The actual modelling and implementing barely took any time at all; I used an off-the-shelf open source solver. But I spend multiple weeks teaching the team enough about linear programming so that they can eg change the model when business requirements change.

[xg15]

I imagine this is where the reputation of a good manager comes in and the ability to say to their boss "hey, we should keep this guy... just trust me on this."

[mym1990]

Good managers are fairly rare, even though every manager probably thinks they are a good manager.

[phtrivier]

I'm one of the few who absolutely believe they're not one of the rare "good" - hopefully, "not yet".

What resources do you recommend to improve ?

[adrianN]

If the company runs on reputation it’s only a matter of time until a consultant comes in and processes are established to move to a more efficient metric based management style.

[wwind123]

Yeah, it's tough either way. Some managers might be biased and keep praising some of their reports that don't actually provide good value for the company. For an outside observer that has no intimate knowledge to the work, how could this be differentiated from the manager having a backbone to support a report that does truly great work but there is no good metric to prove it?

[ranit]

>> He eventually got bored. He retired and joined a seminary.

Wow, got bored and joined a seminary - Do you know how does he feel there? A genuine question - Did he expect to get excited and challenged in a seminary?

[analog8374]

If a smart guy joins a seminary then joining a seminary is probably smart.

[left-struck]

I think a better way to think about it is that humans in general just make so many mistakes and imperfect judgements. Smart people just do them slightly less. Smart people also typically have biases as well which affects their judgement, their basis are just more complicated than normal people. Like obviously being smart is an advantage for any decision, but saying if someone smart does something it must be smart makes no sense in a world where smart people usually can’t agree on what is right.

[analog8374]

it's a pretty good guess that when a smart person does something like this, it's something he considered long and hard and applied his full smartness to, and therefore it is probably the smart move. Right? Let's not split hairs.

[eru]

Compare and contrast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

[abhaynayar]

If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

Money would matter even more than the interpersonal stuff in most cases but on top of it even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.

Getting bored is totally understandable though given his calibre but that's a separate issue from how the company evaluates performance.

[ezst]

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter or need convincing assuming the main goal of the company was to make money.

I'll just be the Nth commenter to say it, but corporations, especially larger ones, are anything but efficient. I don't know if it ever was true, except maybe for companies focused on producing high volumes of highly standardized/specific products in a competitive environment. That's not to say that efficiency isn't desirable or beneficial in general, but as soon as it becomes difficult to put a value tag on the work being done (which unfortunately gets harder in more services oriented corporations), competing for clever ideas just rewards less than competing for the boss's attention. There's no justice or fairness in that.

[eru]

Companies can be efficient and inefficient at the same time. Efficient at some things, and inefficient at other things.

For things with direct bottom line impact and fierce competition, many companies can suddenly become very efficient. But in a big company, that's often the exception rather than the rule.

[throwaw12]

> If his monetary value to the company was as said why would any other metric like complexity even remotely matter

Here is why: I turned off a feature flag in our feature flagging service which saved company 10% infra cost, do you think I can be promoted to Staff+ and lead 50 engineers?

Promotions and/or recognitions in corporate environments works differently.

I don't agree with it, but this is how it works: If what you did feels simple, anyone else can do it as well, why should we promote you for finding such silly mistake or improvement.

[BobbyTables2]

Same with executives and upper management.

One cannot be a director/VP of 3 people. They need an empire…

[jmalicki]

One can be a VP of 0 people.

Look into what the title means at banks!

[eru]

I was an Executive Director / Vice President at Goldman with 0 reports.

[jmalicki]

Banks are the inversion where a Director is higher than a VP! An ED w/o reports is actually moderately impressive though!

[skydhash]

> even the managers treasured him so there should've been even less of an issue of communicating value.

I’m not a fan of doing politicking, bjut after much courses on writing and communication, I strongly believe that such simple solutions could have been presented in a way to justify rewards.

There are people that do nothing worthwhile and can find words to justify themselves. If someone brings value, you can find words to earn him recognition.

[chii]

This is what i hate about modern corporate culture (or human culture in general perhaps).

I dont want to expend effort politiking. I dont want to expend effort blowing my own trumpet. The value of my work is self-evident, but requires an equally intelligent person to understand.

And most people do not understand, and thus, fail to recognize the value.

[eru]

I don't think this has anything to do with _modern_ corporate culture. There was never a golden age where corporate culture was better across the board.

[skydhash]

Sometimes they do understand, but often your nice work may highlights someone's else egregious errors. And the political landscape may not work in your favor. So private praise (if you're lucky) and public silence.

[crabbone]

Oh, I've worked in more than a dozen of software companies. When it comes to planning activities and setting goals, I've rarely seen a lot of sense.

I mean, we are in the industry where it used to be a standard practice, not so long ago, to deliver daily reports about one's activities while "planking", or throwing a beach ball to another person doing some silly acrobatics...

It should come as no surprise that there's no rigorous assessment protocol for these kinds of things anywhere. Retrospectively, I will admit, that enormous amount of effort and resources are wasted due to bad planning. But it's still not done.

I can imagine that with the field becoming more competitive, eventually, the industry specialists will come together and try to address the problem, but so far and for so long the resources just kept flowing in, the huge waste wasn't really a problem.

[Sharlin]

It tells a lot about the state of software "engineering" if it's difficult to convince people of the value of the very best ones (the "lazy and smart officers" in the old story). No good engineer can ever be in love with complexity, that's like an automatic disqualification.

[random3]

reminds me of this other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498385

[nradov]

How is that sad? A disruptive competitor will come along and eat their lunch. Creative destruction is the natural order of things. Ideally the badly managed organization will eventually be liquidated, thus freeing up resources for more productive activities.

[golem14]

Unless they are, in addition to bad at management, really good at regulatory capture.

E.g. Experian, Transunion and their ilk are unlikely to be eaten as lunch soon.

Apologies to the good engineers and managers in those orgs!

[thelonelyborg]

great story.

[doctorpangloss]

okay, another POV is that hardly any real problems are math problems, but we seem to call solving math problems "problem solving" when that's really not true at all. like the easy part is the math. the hard part is persuading other people.

[boothby]

A great many real world problems have, at their crux, a mathematical problem. A mathematician paired with a subject matter expert can be powerful indeed when each sees deeply into the others' blind spots. But, I've heard statements like yours a lot over the years: assuming mathematicians aren't fully aware of the limitations of what you think math is.

[ForOldHack]

Its all a math problem, and if it isn't a math problem, its a database problem. I come across a lot of problems, and since I always try to reduce it to a math problem... I intuitively come up with both the solution to the problem, but solutions to other problems. But, if it's not a math problem, of course, its a database problem.

I would safely assume that there are no limitations of what mathematicians can do, with one important exception: Andrew, for whom I argued about the mis-uses of Infinity. Andrew is, well, rather famous.

[eru]

The hard part is often finding a way to turn your business problem into a math problem in the first place.

[topaz0]

Database problems are math problems too.