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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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      This excerpt from Science of Discworld 3, from a chapter titled “A lack of sergeants” somehow resonates in light of @pmarca builder essay. Loss of capacity for building is the loss-of-sergeants problem.pic.twitter.com/89gJcL8Lco

      4 replies 15 retweets 59 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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      Thing is, this is not a world that does its building in sergeant-mode anymore. Either you have the “full-stack” doer who can do everything from ideate to execute (which doesn’t scale well) or you have an algorithmic “sergeant” layer that can scale but only coordinate simple work.

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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      The Industrial Age formula the sergeant fits into is this: Precondition: army trained to follow orders with steady pay Officer: assessed risks and goals and decides a trench must be dug Sergeant: assigns sections of trench, hands out shovels Infantry grunt: digs, no thinking

      1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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      This is WW1 coordination formula. WW2 blitzkrieg coordination formula still needs sergeants, but initiative/creativity devolve down the stack. Sergeants have to act more like resourceful CEOs rather than bark orders. Infantry is not grunts anymore but have to maneuver skillfully.

      11:12 AM - 21 Apr 2020
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      • David McDougall Rahul Ramchandani portalnyc ilija तुम्हारा, सागर । ian m hines Michael Gasiorek 🦁 nth horizon (ovc terminal go zrr)
      1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          Now we’re in late-stage OODA/2-pizza team world. The sergeant is the scrum master running sprints in small teams, not a tactical field commander running dozens of men or a WW1 sergeant lining up lots of cannon fodder.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          I’m in a later stage still... free agents/indie consultants where there are effectively no sergeants. Effective coordination has to emerge, and it rarely dies. Thing about sergeant-based coordination is it is a paycheck-economy paradigm.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          I’m actually decent at sergeant-mode operations. I just don’t *like* doing sergeant-mode work. It is a stressful, thankless role, and has neither the satisfaction of doing something with your hands and saying “I dug that trench” nor claim the idea as “I thought of the trench”

          1 reply 2 retweets 15 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          In civilian world, sergeants morphed first into managers/shift supervisors, and then into clueless middle management layer of taller orgs, getting slowly depressed working coordination problem far removed from either end of the satisfying action — leadership and doing.

          2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          I wrote about this in Unbundling the Manager a few years back. I have no bright ideas on how to fix this.https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/unbundling-the-manager …

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          Science of Discworld 3 is from 2005, so not ancient despite the WW1 mental model (the book is not really about this... it’s a digression) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Discworld_III:_Darwin%27s_Watch …

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Apr 21
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          There may be a hard constraint here: complex coordination requires a closed-world condition. It can only happen in layers relatively shielded from risk to the point they can act like algorithms. That’s why so much sergeant work is being reduced to algorithms.

          2 replies 2 retweets 14 likes
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        9. End of conversation

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