I swear to god, every time I read a post by Jason, I wish he was my manager. I consider myself a highly productive person, but constantly hampered, directly and indirectly, by terrible managers. Jason always comes off as the kind of person that amplifies the abilities of his team. That is all...I'm gushing and its embarrassing.
The problem is that the engineer's "I don't know" gets beaten out of you when you speak to users and investors. You get made to feel like an amateur for admitting uncertainty. Which is absurd in the startup world of all places. So it's one of those doublethink situations, where you need to keep your internal accounting separate from the marketing talk. And then you need to know who to tell what on top of that. And then actually deal with the actual uncertainty on top of <i>that</i>. As if startups weren't hard enough in general, we're making it even worse for ourselves.
In Indian culture, knowledge (viveka) is always accompanied with humility (vinaya).<p>Thus, counter-intuitively, saying 'I don't know' is an indicator of the speaker's knowledge, as he is aware of areas of his ignorance.<p>Contrast with an arrogant attitude of "I-know-everything-or-can-find-it-out" and the fuck-ups that inevitably follow.<p>Aside: I would really like to know what the solution to keeping the listings updated was. Or, is that a trade secret? ;)<p>edit: s/Aide/Aside
It's not just "I don't know" that is important, but also the next part of the thought: "but I can find out."<p>Just admitting you don't know is great, but it's not good enough. You have to also be able to take the next step <i>and find out</i>.<p>If I ask two people if they know how to do something, and one of them says "I don't know" and the other says "I don't know, but I can find out," then... well, I don't really need to complete that thought. You can see the difference right there.<p>But other than that, Jason is spot on. This is something I've been keeping an eye out for for years. When I interview people, I ask a question, and when they're clearly bullshitting me, I'll stop them and say, "It's okay if you don't know." The best candidates will often back down, like Jason did in his example, and say "Yeah, I don't really know, but I'll figure it out."<p>Bullshitting me with an answer isn't a red flag. It means you're at least thinking about the problem. But admitting you don't know but are willing to figure it out is a far, far superior answer. Very few real-world problems demand an answer RIGHT NOW. Most can wait until some research is done.
This reminds me of what a good PHP dev told me once - he interviewed a bunch of candidates for a company before as a favor, asking a bunch of specific tough domain questions. Almost all of the candidates tried to spew a bunch of nonsense & wiggle their way through them, but only one candidate had the confidence to tell him each time that "I don't know, I would google it". That was the candidate that got hired, and when that person asked down the line why he was picked, the person who interviewed him told him that he was the only candidate to not bullshit him and tell him the answer that reflected how software engineers think.<p>There is value in people who can tell upfront what their thoughts are, since they are identifying where there are potential problems.
"While there are lots of tactics, there is no one true silver bullet. "<p>I'm old enough to have worked with Coldwell Banker when they rolled out their commercial real estate operations on the East Coast (they had been only a west coast company at first).<p>What they did was assign a college student (typically on summer break or part time) to go out to each area and literally catalog all the commercial office space for part of the time and then the rest they would spend in the office calling up the building owner (or manager) and verifying the data collected.<p>This was many years ago but it worked quite well. A database was compiled and updated.<p>Bottom line is no matter how you cut this is a manual process.<p>You know why the yellow pages was such a success? Relevant data that while it came out 1 time per year typically was highly accurate for that year.<p>They made enough money (by selling advertising to a captive audience) that they were able to employ an entire quality checking and sales organization to verify and collect the data which ended up in a product that was widely used up until the internet came along. But once again they had the profit margin and captive audience to make the whole process work and that was a key part of that success.
I really like this idea and try to apply it as much as possible. In my experience, for any kind of teamwork, the faster we get to the "I don't knows", the faster we solve problems, while stating half-truths/guesses-as-facts spreads confusion and kills productivity. I've also noticed that the type of person who is afraid to admit knowledge gaps is usually also the one who looks at me funny or expresses disapproval whenever I use the phrase. It's as if they are confused as to why I would ever admit such weakness.
> Kiran explained that he likes it when people say I don’t know because it lends credibility to everything else that they’ve said.<p>I'd take that a step further, and say that people who assign proper levels of certainty to their beliefs tend to be credible. Most people seem to only be able to think in absolutes.
If you found the post interesting, you may also like reading how Kiran seems to have attacked the question he posed to Jason: <a href="http://divvela.com/post/77189320557/an-army-to-help-you" rel="nofollow">http://divvela.com/post/77189320557/an-army-to-help-you</a>
Good point, and I agree, I also enjoy working with people who can admit when they just don't know something. It shouldn't be so hard to do, there is a nearly infinite amount of stuff each of us doesn't know -- especially when it comes to forward looking challenges we just haven't started thinking concretely about yet. My favorite response when asked about such things is "I'm not sure; we'll burn that bridge when we get to it".<p>This topic is even more relevant for software over other types of knowledge, IMO, keeping in mind the Knuth quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it".<p>Even when I'm pretty sure that task XYZ can be completed relatively easily using language A, framework B and API C, I still won't answer in complete absolutes unless I've worked on the compiler for A, written a fair amount of B, and previously exhausted all the functionality of C.
While the point of the article isn't the domain problem, I'll add that the hardest management job I've had was trying to retroactively fix a data aggregation process that had been built manually over many years.<p>The work was extraordinarily tedious, error prone, yet business critical. We had to keep shimming in new parts of the system, while keeping the old system afloat. While the system was always on the verge of imploding, from the outside, it basically appeared to work, which kept the project chronically understaffed.<p>I have a lot respect for anyone who aggregates time critical production data from different sources. The nature of the work makes it extremely stressful, yet surprisingly easy for outsiders to underestimate.
I like to think of this as being "confident in your ignorance." Whether you're a manager or early in your career, the way in which you admit what you don't know and ask clarifying questions can have a profound impact.
If I don't know something I've made it a point to tell them that.<p>Generally, I follow it up by letting whomever know that I can attempt to discover an answer to the question.<p>If the question is about how something works, I'll occasionally explain how I think it might work based on how I'd implement it, but again advise that it's just a guess and I really do not know.
I'm slightly exasperated with this mythical cultural fit being used as the end all quality you seek in your potential employee. If someone can please spare some time to write a no-nonsense definition so that even an alien could understand I'll be grateful. All I ever get are hand-wavy explanations.
My attitude is that preemptive honesty establishes credibility. Even more when it is backed up by everything else you do.<p>By contrast up front evidence of defensive behavior is a red flag for me in all sorts of situations.