This makes a lot of sense to me and helps me articulate things I’ve thought for a while. (Which, you know, is the shit I come to LessWrong for, so big thumbs up!)
One of the first times I had this realization was in one of my first professional experiences. This was the first time in my life where I was in a team that wasn’t just LARPing a set of objectives, but actually trying to achieve them.
They weren’t impressively competent, or especially efficient, or even especially good at their job. The objectives weren’t especially ambitious: it was a long-running project in its final year, and everybody was just trying to ship the best product they could, where the difference between “best they could” and “mediocre” wasn’t huge.
But everyone was taking the thing seriously. People in the team were communicating about their difficulties, and anticipating problems ahead of time. Managers considered trade-offs. Developers tried to consider the UX that end-users would face.
Thinking about it, I’m realizing that knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as being super good at your job, even if the two are strongly correlated. What struck me about this team wasn’t that they were the most competent people I ever worked with (that would probably be my current job), it’s that they didn’t feel like they were pretending to be trying to achieve their objectives (again, unlike my current job).
This makes a lot of sense to me and helps me articulate things I’ve thought for a while. (Which, you know, is the shit I come to LessWrong for, so big thumbs up!)
One of the first times I had this realization was in one of my first professional experiences. This was the first time in my life where I was in a team that wasn’t just LARPing a set of objectives, but actually trying to achieve them.
They weren’t impressively competent, or especially efficient, or even especially good at their job. The objectives weren’t especially ambitious: it was a long-running project in its final year, and everybody was just trying to ship the best product they could, where the difference between “best they could” and “mediocre” wasn’t huge.
But everyone was taking the thing seriously. People in the team were communicating about their difficulties, and anticipating problems ahead of time. Managers considered trade-offs. Developers tried to consider the UX that end-users would face.
Thinking about it, I’m realizing that knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as being super good at your job, even if the two are strongly correlated. What struck me about this team wasn’t that they were the most competent people I ever worked with (that would probably be my current job), it’s that they didn’t feel like they were pretending to be trying to achieve their objectives (again, unlike my current job).