Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]
The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything.The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed high in management hierarchies despite knowing nothing about the technologies they claim to be experts in.They're are the 'Agile coaches' who have never done actual scrum. The 'enterprise architects' who couldn't write fizzbuzz if their life depended on it. The 'thought leaders' who read a couple blogs about blockchain.They are a cancer to the entire industry. I don't expect C level leadership to be savvy enough to call them out for another 5-10 years, but something needs to be done about these types of people. They actively cause damage to the course of any business by setting unrealistic expectations about what technology can do, how much it costs, and how long it takes.