I think you’re right and I honestly think OP’s point is the exception not the rule. They’re thinking of when a sr eng can delegate to a jr eng or something. Engineering managers can’t always replicate their ICs’ work but the ICs’ work typically should be legible to them.
If I “delegate” a kitchen renovation, that’s just called hiring a contractor, and yeah it’s hard to do well, especially as your ability to evaluate their work goes down. But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
It’s really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won’t be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman’s standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
My guess is learning how to do this took like 20 hours? A small fraction of what a kitchen renovation took, and a huge boost to my ability to find good contractors.
This is the kind of mentality I don’t understand and want to avoid at Lightcone. Renovating a kitchen is not some magically complicated tasks. If you really had to figure out how to do it fully on your own you could probably just learn it using Youtube tutorials and first-principles reasoning in a month or two. Indeed, you will be able to directly watch the journeys of people who have done exactly that on Youtube, so you can even see what likely goes wrong and not make the same mistakes.
Of course, then don’t do it all on your own, but it’s really not that hard to get to a point where you could do it on your own, if slowly.
Ehh my experience trying to hang a picture says otherwise. I got a stud detector that just beeps when it feels like and still haven’t really figured out what material my walls are made of. Claude has it narrowed down to like 14 different possibilities. A kitchen reno is also a highly regulated task where I live https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/renovating-kitchens-bathrooms.page not to mention additional HOA rules since you’re affecting people above you, below you, and next to you. Plus my building has an “ancient pipes” problem and during renos they require you to fix plumbing as you go. Electric work would probably intimidate me because you have to wait and see if your house doesn’t catch fire to find out if you did it right or not.
Conversely I just haven’t renovated it because all the problems you said with delegating still hold.
I did manage to caulk my bathroom, looks awful but less roaches now.
Seems like you missed the point of the post? Last 2 paragraphs
Knowing how to perform a task yourself at all is not the same as knowing how to perform it as well as the person you are delegating the task to. The goal is not to ensure that competence across every work-relevant dimension strictly declines as you go down the organizational hierarchy. You frequently will, and should, delegate to people who are 10x faster, or 10x better at a task than you are yourself.
But by knowing how to perform a task yourself, if slowly or more jankily than your delegees, you will maintain the ability to set realistic performance standards, jump in and keep pushing on the task if it becomes an organizational bottleneck, and audit systems and automations that are produced as part of working on the task. This will take you a bunch of time, and often feel like it detracts from more urgent priorities, but is worth the high cost.
I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.
I think you’re right and I honestly think OP’s point is the exception not the rule. They’re thinking of when a sr eng can delegate to a jr eng or something. Engineering managers can’t always replicate their ICs’ work but the ICs’ work typically should be legible to them.
If I “delegate” a kitchen renovation, that’s just called hiring a contractor, and yeah it’s hard to do well, especially as your ability to evaluate their work goes down. But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
It’s really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won’t be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman’s standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
My guess is learning how to do this took like 20 hours? A small fraction of what a kitchen renovation took, and a huge boost to my ability to find good contractors.
This is the kind of mentality I don’t understand and want to avoid at Lightcone. Renovating a kitchen is not some magically complicated tasks. If you really had to figure out how to do it fully on your own you could probably just learn it using Youtube tutorials and first-principles reasoning in a month or two. Indeed, you will be able to directly watch the journeys of people who have done exactly that on Youtube, so you can even see what likely goes wrong and not make the same mistakes.
Of course, then don’t do it all on your own, but it’s really not that hard to get to a point where you could do it on your own, if slowly.
Ehh my experience trying to hang a picture says otherwise. I got a stud detector that just beeps when it feels like and still haven’t really figured out what material my walls are made of. Claude has it narrowed down to like 14 different possibilities. A kitchen reno is also a highly regulated task where I live https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/renovating-kitchens-bathrooms.page not to mention additional HOA rules since you’re affecting people above you, below you, and next to you. Plus my building has an “ancient pipes” problem and during renos they require you to fix plumbing as you go. Electric work would probably intimidate me because you have to wait and see if your house doesn’t catch fire to find out if you did it right or not.
Conversely I just haven’t renovated it because all the problems you said with delegating still hold.
I did manage to caulk my bathroom, looks awful but less roaches now.
Seems like you missed the point of the post? Last 2 paragraphs
I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.