How to tell if someone is bullshitting
Ever been around a group of people discussing some technology and heard Cool-Whip phrases like this?
It’s not about MySQL versus PostgreSQL, it’s about using the right tool for the job.
Or how about this one?
You need to take the important factors into account before you decide whether [hot new fad] or [trusty old solution] is best suited for your application.
Both are signs that someone might be trying to sound important. In situations like this, I’ve noticed that the people I look up to usually don’t make weighty-sounding statements about other people’s systems. They talk about what they are qualified to talk about: either they say something about their own systems, or if it’s warranted and invited, they ask intelligent questions about other people’s systems.
People who only have vacuous generalities to contribute don’t talk about their own systems, because if they actually worked on systems that qualified them to contribute to the conversation, they’d have something of substance to say. And they don’t ask questions, because they don’t know what to ask. (The third option — say nothing — seems unacceptable, I guess.)
For the love of all that is good, please do not look back through my blog archives. I don’t want to know.
Awesome post. Made me smile ;)
Richard Ayotte
19 Nov 09 at 10:33 pm
I also like, “That won’t scale!” without defining a reasonable limit for it to scale too.
Eric Bergen
20 Nov 09 at 12:08 am
Gotta work the word Synergy in there. ;)
Mike Hillyer
20 Nov 09 at 12:34 am
INNOVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY AWARD-WINNING LEADING DISRUPTIVE BLEEDING EDGE NEXT-GENERATION SYNERGY
VadimTk
20 Nov 09 at 1:09 am
I don’t think “won’t scale” without specifying limits is a problem — that’s kind of the point of “scaling”. I’m concerned when people say “won’t scale” without understanding either what axis they want to scale. There are axes over which you really do have limits and scalability isn’t important and there are axes where it matters. Understanding which is which is the hard (and important) question to answer.
Gerg
20 Nov 09 at 3:42 am
oops, sorry left the “either” in there when I removed the other thing. For the record the other thing was what constraints you need it to scale under.
Gerg
20 Nov 09 at 3:43 am
I think this is overgeneralizing — to be more specific, if that’s the *totality* of what someone is saying, it can be BS.
I’ve heard MANY people *start* a discussion with “it depends” and segue into *why* it depends, or what’s better for one solution vs. the other. You *do* have to pick the right tool for the job, and then there are the nuances between “what’s the best for you and your environment” vs. “what’s the absolute best” — ie, if you have 4 Oracle DBA’s, and have a small application, in many cases putting the small app against Oracle is best, rather than trying to learn MySQL — even though MySQL may be a better technical solution for the app itself.
(according to your definition, the above labels me as full of BS, but I don’t have time to write out all the nuances…..)
(so maybe people are being lazy instead of BS’ing? never attribute to malice….)
Sheeri K. Cabral
20 Nov 09 at 4:12 am
How to tell if someone has nothing to blog about:
Unsubstantial complaining about common expressions other people use.
Adrienne Léontine
20 Nov 09 at 8:02 am
i wish anonymous commenting was allowed :-)
Jonas
20 Nov 09 at 1:54 pm
an additional comment to Mike Hillyer…
Gotta also work in:
Low hanging fruit.
and
coming full circle
Chris
20 Nov 09 at 7:35 pm
I’m sure sometimes people think I’m BSing. Its really just my slow memory, messing me up.
Typical conversation with me:
Other person: blah, blah yaddda {hot new feature}
Me: [Hot new feature]! Hmmm… but would that be … I guess it could …. I remember having a problem with [hot new feature] .. Something about having too much fiber in my diet.. No, that’s not right. Maybe if you used [hot new feature] in [the most common way its talked about] that would bypass the fiber limitation I was having. I guess. I can’t remember now. But it was something.
Me @ 2 am the next morning: Oh yeah, I was using [hot new feature] with [unstable build of component X] because [stable build of component X] had a bug with [stable build of component Y]. Nothing at all to do with fiber. What was I thinking?
William
24 Nov 09 at 1:20 pm
VadimTk, your comment had so much BS that Akismet spammed it ;-)
Xaprb
3 Dec 09 at 9:00 am
These links could also help:
http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/53-how-to-detect-bullshit/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805
Giuseppe Maxia
9 Dec 09 at 5:33 am