Funny how the things you found out at the hedge fund translate to most other aspects of life. I've seen first hand that objectively worse ideas were presented with lots of confidence. I don't even know if everyone is aware of their bias, it might just be they have an idea and go into full confirmation-bias research mode and of course end up with the outcome they thought they would. And like you mention, they get rewarded too. Especially when outcomes are difficult to measure, it seems managers love to take confidence as the prime metric in the absence of other metrics. The crazy thing is that taking the confidence of people that don't try to game the system might actually not be a very bad metric, but doing that will open the gates for the bullshit artists.
I'm glad I have a good manager who seems to see beyond that. He's given praise for people saying they don't know instead of bluffing their way through. It seems so basic but it goes wrong all the time. So in terms of fixing this, I think it helps to have people around you be aware of these biases and educate them on it if they aren't. It also helps to ask critical questions. We had to make a web app responsive retroactively once, and there was one voice very loud and confident. Once we started asking questions, it became apparent he'd never worked on responsive websites. Seeing as the team lead at the time almost followed his lead made me realize just how prevalent this is.
So thanks for posting this, really loved reading about your background and the dynamic with your boss and G.
Funny how the things you found out at the hedge fund translate to most other aspects of life. I've seen first hand that objectively worse ideas were presented with lots of confidence. I don't even know if everyone is aware of their bias, it might just be they have an idea and go into full confirmation-bias research mode and of course end up with the outcome they thought they would. And like you mention, they get rewarded too. Especially when outcomes are difficult to measure, it seems managers love to take confidence as the prime metric in the absence of other metrics. The crazy thing is that taking the confidence of people that don't try to game the system might actually not be a very bad metric, but doing that will open the gates for the bullshit artists.
I'm glad I have a good manager who seems to see beyond that. He's given praise for people saying they don't know instead of bluffing their way through. It seems so basic but it goes wrong all the time. So in terms of fixing this, I think it helps to have people around you be aware of these biases and educate them on it if they aren't. It also helps to ask critical questions. We had to make a web app responsive retroactively once, and there was one voice very loud and confident. Once we started asking questions, it became apparent he'd never worked on responsive websites. Seeing as the team lead at the time almost followed his lead made me realize just how prevalent this is.
So thanks for posting this, really loved reading about your background and the dynamic with your boss and G.
thanks for reading! sounds like you have a great manager :) i'm sure they'd love to hear that, make sure to tell them you appreciate that!