I think everyone should be stocking up on at least a month of food because survival-grade food is cheap and has at least a10% chance of being very useful to you at some point, either in this pandemic or for a different emergency.
Liron
Karma: 3,662
Ya this is a good example of how to communicate to Fred without a forward-facing frame.
This probably makes Fred think “I’m doing something wrong in meetings and I better fall in line”, i.e. go from “bad” to “acceptable”.
The forward-facing frame is for when you’d rather have Fred’s mental model be to take the next step in the path toward “very good”. Once you’ve established that forward-to-backward spectrum, it’s then ok to also emphasize how his current position is bad.
I wouldn’t start the feedback by saying there have been complaints about Fred. I’d only say that part after establishing a forward-facing frame, or not at all.
And to build on my heuristic from the previous comment: if Fred’s whole job is a very structured one where “acceptable” and “very good” are basically the same state, that’s when the forward-facing frame is least needed.
This is a great point and I think I should preface the advice in the post with a condition.
If clear expectations have been set, e.g. needing to show up to work on time every day, then it’s optimal to have the employee represent in their mind that they have performed below standard. But when there’s any gray area about whether or not they’re meeting a standard, as is often the case for creative/knowledge workers, and your goal is to make them perform to their potential, then the forward-facing frame seems like a better technique rather than giving them a kind of negative assessment that they’re not expecting.
How to Frame Negative Feedback as Forward-Facing Guidance
Hmmm interesting, thanks for posting this! Overall the fact that humans are so much smarter than chimps but still have the same-size tiny-on-any-absolute-scale symbolic working memory seems to support my original claim that this is a tragically sucky situation.
Wow as Vakus Drake said, looks like chimps have more working memory than us, at least in one sense that feels important: https://twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1213860120058220546
This content is a real gem. It’s easy and fun to read, yet offers a high density of CFAR’s unique insights which are worth knowing to improve your life. It also manages to speak to all rationality skill levels and knowledge.
I would love to see this content featured on CFAR’s site, which is currently kind of a black box in terms of what specific “rationality” they teach. There’s this FAQ answer that lists the topics of the workshop, but I suspect it’s better to let prospective workshop attendees dive in more ahead of time if they’re curious.
I was so inspired by how this handbook makes CFAR look good that we’re now working on the same thing at my startup Relationship Hero, a public-facing handbook that will make our coaching less of a black box. Update: It’s live here.
Alright I shall update to a belief that maybe there’s some different dynamic that makes remote work less advantageous when an organization size is in the 10,000+ range.
What are all these “costs” that outweigh the benefits? I suspect they are easy enough to circumvent. My observation is that all the same tools being invented that make non-remote companies more productive (e.g. Slack) are usable remotely.
I’d still bet 1:1 odds that 2+ of the top 10 US companies by market cap in 5 years will allow more than 50% of their employed software engineers to work from anywhere.
You think I would use the language of belief probabilities as a figure of speech???
I’m up for $100 vs $100. Just send me a message at https://m.me/sendmessage to confirm with your real identity.
I don’t have any hard data but I’d bet that the ratio of “work locations per market cap dollar” has been steadily increasing in the economy over the last few years. (A measure of how distributed each company’s workforce is, and weighting higher-market-cap companies higher.)
I also bet more than 50% chance that within 3 years at least one of {Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon} will give more than 50% of their software engineers the ability to work from home for at least 80% of their workdays.
The fact that Stripe ($30B+ valuation) is now actively hiring many remote employees is a significant recent anecdote I can offer. Do you have any significant anecdotes indicating a remote work decrease?
But every sufficiently large organization is already distributed across lots of offices and timezones. Why should we expect the distinction between “on-site” and “off-site” work to be relevant to productivity if on-site work is already remotely distributed?
The inside view is: even if you’re in the same office with all the people who matter to your job, most of your job is done by you interfacing with your computer. Even when I did the whole “live with your startup cofounder in a 2BR apartment” thing, we worked in separate rooms and interacted via text. So what specific interactions happen in meatspace that are durably necessary for increased productivity in our increasingly virtual world, and can’t be compensated for by any creative remote-work best practices?
It seems obvious to me that the answer is nothing.
I’m confident that the larger trend is the opposite of the examples you’ve witnessed. Sure, big companies who wake up to the importance of having engineering resources might first get the idea to hire them in-house, but remote work is clearly a huge trend throughout the economy. One way to understand this is that even “in-house” often means that a company’s own employees are working across national/international offices or working from home.
I think competition explains a lot of it. Using USPS instead of UPS or Fedex is a free-market choice, but I don’t have much choice where to get electricity for my home or where to get a driver’s license after moving to a new state.
From my other comment:
What kind of workers are producing more value? What are the characteristics of a job that enables more value creation? One where there’s more leverage, i.e. an hour of work produces more economic value, without a corresponding increase in supply.
Another example of a sector that’s seeing much higher economic leverage is white-collar work serving high-cost-of-living countries/cities from within lower-cost-of-living countries/cities. E.g. English-speaking workers from our neighbor Mexico where real income per capita is only 28% of the US’s, can now create more value on their time by working from home and copy editing articles, or doing phone customer service, or graphic design, and even management-level work like marketing strategy and project management.
Unfortunately remote workers’ leverage increase here is partly zero-sum because it decreases the economic leverage that local workers get from their location. But it’s actually positive sum because poorer people tend to benefit from a wealth transfer more than richer people lose. It’s also positive sum because some jobs are only worth paying below the local living wage. E.g. a San Francisco company might be able to afford paying $12/hr for a customer service representative, which is far below cost of living in the SF Bay Area, but not bad in Mississippi.
Remote work has also created higher leverage on the value of everyone’s haven’t-gotten-dressed time or currently-babysitting time, regardless of their previous baseline.
Also note that one type of remote white-collar work is programming. Companies hiring their in-house software engineers offshore to work remotely, or contracting with offshore software consultancies, is also an increasingly common practice which is helping other economies and raising US GDP while reducing US programmer salaries, but the US salary effect is small because the whole world’s programmer supply is still not keeping pace with global demand growth.
Ah right yes, ok so not a huge increase. Meanwhile, I’ve seen real value of entry-level programmer compensation packages at least double since 2000, probably more like triple.
I think my point about GDP growth helping the outside view is this: *some* significant chunks of sectors in the economy are getting significantly more productive. What kind of workers are producing more value? What are the characteristics of a job that enables more value creation? One where there’s more leverage, i.e. an hour of work produces more economic value, without a corresponding increase in supply. And any sector where the leverage on time is increasing say 5x+ per decade is a good bet for an area where supply is trailing demand.
We don’t understand why programmers are paid so well
It might be pretty straightforward.
GDP is 2x higher than in 2000Real GDP per capita is up 25% since 2000, so some category of workers must have gottenat least 2xmore productive in that timeframe, so their real income should be2xhigher. That seems like a plausible story for the software engineering career.This simplified model is consistent with my inside view. I can help sufficiently big companies save $millions/yr, or earn $millions/yr more, by writing software that streamlines some detail of their internal processes or external interactions. And my ability to do this is obviously much higher thanks to all the tools that exist today that didn’t exist in 2000: cloud computing, tons of third-party APIs, ubiquitous mobile phones with fast chips and internet connections, huge high-resolution monitors, Stack Overflow, etc.
The tech entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant talks a lot about how “leveraging yourself up” is the key to getting rich. E.g. these days Joe Rogan makes $1M for recording a 90-min podcast because he built a following. He has distribution as leverage.
Programming in the internet age is an unprecedentedly huge source of economic leverage on human capital. A doctor or lawyer sells an hour of their time with a limited impact multiplier—they benefit one patient or one party in one case. In contrast, it keeps getting more common throughout the economy for an hour of a programmer’s time to give value to thousands or millions of customers. Plus, the programmers are constantly getting better tools to get 10x more functionality built in that hour of time than was possible a few years ago. For example, building a basic form to accept a credit card payment has gone from taking days to minutes thanks to Stripe, a company that launched in 2010 and is now worth $30B. But they didn’t just make themselves rich, they added to the leverage that the rest of us have. It’s a real leveragefest.
It seems like software will continue to “eat the world” and add tons of economic value for a while. At the very least I’d confidently bet on another decade where supply increases much more slowly than demand, and the gap between career appeal of doctors/lawyers and software engineers will widen further in that time.
The Power to Draw Better
Yep I’m sympathetic to your post. As for the counterargument, I have two rebuttals:
1. I would agree if we were talking about e.g. money-limited people donating small token amounts to effective charities to build their identities, but “one who limits personal carbon footprint outside of a strategy to stop global warming” isn’t even an identity people should want :)
2. Even if we give up on talking about strong causal mechanisms and just talk about weak effects of one’s carbon-footprint-reduction efforts like “raising awareness of the issue”, there’s also the self-licensing effect where people are satisfied to think of themselves as a good person after just taking one or two actions, so actions that don’t help can drive out actions that would have helped.
Awesome, I think the Western world currently has a shortage of specific ambitious proposals like this. Strong upvote.
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel calls this “definite future” mindset and specifically mentions the Reber Plan as an example.
This seems like a good time to sign up you and your loved ones for cryonics