alt Hacker News> you get hired for your proven ability to (…)
No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…)
The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks.
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In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all.
I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up in jobs where the main problems aren't actually technical. Which, let's be honest, is the case in very many tech jobs.
> perceived ability
In this case at least it's definitely more than that. Ever since LLMs became a thing, there has been a constant search to find it's "killer app". Given the steep rise in popularity, regardless of the problems, that is now OpenClaw. As they say, the proof's in the pudding; this guy has created something highly desirable by the many.
to--> latexr: Thank you for the link to Polum's essay in juliusosis. It really is the case that a lot of incompetence is hiding in plain sight. Probably because modern schooling encourages this.
I've lived in China (as a foreigner) and they have a word for Juliuses. They call them the 'cha bu duo xiansheng' = the 'Mr. Almost ok'.
The world is full of Juliuses. And if one works with enough people one can suddenly realize that they too are a Julius relative to someone smarter and more introverted. Worth considering this before dismissing someone as yet another Julius. Oh and everything doesn't suck.
Your comment and the article expanded my world view a little bit. Thank you.
I think you're right but you've been a bit pedantic about the parent comment. They sloppily said that delivering business value gets you hired, when in reality the appearance of that may do. But I think we all understood their main thrust was to disagree with the comment before them about coding ability, and the point is that this doesn't always correlate with business value.
I did enjoy your link though.
> Pour celleux qui ne connaissent pas l’informatique
This is if not the best article i have read recently. Julius ...
My imposter syndrome is essentially fear of being julius.
How about none of the above, but hired because of wanting OpenClaw?
Wow, that blog post really gave me pause and has stuck in my head for the last hour or so.
Everything is perception though. You are looking at this with your own perception, biases, and heuristics just like everyone else. There is no 'right' way to hire.
Great article until the end when they talked about AI.
I haven't seen that before. But it was really hard get to the end. Not because it's bad written or so, on the contrary is a very good piece. However the feeling is unfathomable. I hate Julius'es. More so I hate the managers blinded by Julius'es.
Julius sounds like a sociopath. Sociopaths have no empathy/morals, so they can confidently lie all day and still be perfectly fulfilled; and some of them can be very excellent at social manipulation. This level of confidence in all things, including complete bullshitting, and constantly climbing the corporate ladder for huge payoffs, is not too uncommon among them.
IMO, all you can really do around one is try to focus on yourself. Or get away as fast as you can, depending on the situation.
Talk about going all the way to write the story and seeing the point go by
Your boss liked Julius. People liked Julius
You're not going to convince people they have to pay more attention to the technical guy that can't string a though together and answers in a grumpy mood
Be more like Julius and you might get more of his laurels
Oh, Julius. Haven't we all met a Julius.
Story! Long ago, very long ago, I was working at a tiny Web company. Not very technical, though the designers were solid and the ops competent.
We once ended up hosting a site that came under a bit of national attention during an event that this site had news about. The link started circulating broadly, the URL mentioned on TV, and the site immediately buckled under the load.
The national visibility of the outage as well as the opportunity cost for the customer were pretty bad. Picture a bunch of devs, ops, sales and customer wrangling people, anxiously packed around the keyboard of the one terminal we managed to get logged into the server.
That, and Julius, the recently hired replacement CTO.
Julius, I still suspect, was selected by the previous CTO, who was not delighted about his circumstances, as something of a revenge. Early on, Julius scavenged the design docs I was trying to put together at the time to get the teams out of constant firefighting mode, and then started misquoting them, mispronouncing the technical terms. He did so confidently and engagingly. The salespeople liked him, at first.
The shine was starting to come off by the time that site went down. In a company that's too small for teams to pick up the slack from a Julius forever, that'll happen eventually.
So here we were, with one terminal precariously logged into the barely responding server, and a lot of national eyes on us. This was the early days of the Web. Something like Cloudflare would not exist for years.
So it fell on me. My idea was that we needed to replace the page at the widely circulated URL with a static version, and do so very, very fast. I figured that our Web servers were usually configured to serve index.html first if present, with dynamic rendering only occurring if not. So I ended up just using wget on localhost to save whatever was being dynamically generated as index.html, and let the server just serve that for the time being.
This was not perfect and the bits that required dynamic behavior were stuck frozen, but that was an acceptable trade-off. And the site instantly came back up, to the relief of everyone present.
A few weeks later, the sales folks, plus Julius, went to pitch our services to a new customer prospect. I bumped into one of them at the coffee machine right afterwards. His face said it all. It had not gone well.
Our eyes met.
And he said, with all the tiredness in the world: "He tried to sell them the 'wget optimizer'..."