How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#2I went in agreeing with the headline, and the article just didn't follow through on it (also, thank god for readability view. 2560 pixels wide lines with no margin are not any more readable than blogs full of ads).
So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly abnormal? Even in one of the very first paragraphs, "the company whose culture is so odd that ...". And since when is marking flaky tests is "completely messed up practice"?
Ok so a lot of this is about coding practices and such but... like the guy said, those problems sort themselves out. Bad security gets broken into, the companies eventually get hit and either die out or fix themselves. Etc...
There's a lot of completely messed up practices in tech. Oh lord, especially as a european looking in to the SV world. Some of those messed up practices I can't even mention on HN because people think they are so normal, I get mass downvoted and have to engage 5 people telling me how normal this is (in fact I might even have to engage in it by just mentioning this).
1. The issues highlighted tend to be problems specific to people. Programmers that don't know how to do some aspect of security properly, that's a problem specific to those guys. You put me next to them, I'll do that bit properly but will be clueless about a different bit. It's all fixable.
2. The actual programming & design is the least problematic, mostly because it's the one that's most easily changed. Trying to change culture gets you fired. Fixing a pipeline with noticeable improvements gets you promoted. The one bit I did agree with was that it is hard to show improvement when you prevent a fire. I also think that's fixable and I also think that's a people problem, except at the manager level.
You want messed up practices? Look at the game dev industry and its mandated crunched and burnouts. "Everybody's crunching for the next 6 months because we really want to see the game released on time".
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#3nor·mal - adjective 1. conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. "it's quite normal for puppies to bolt their food"
All the things that he writes about are normal - they happen. People (myself included) with an engineering background are surprised when things don't "make sense" or people don't do things the "right way." The trick is to get to the point where these things are not surprising, where you see them as part of the systems you are trying to understand and consequences of forces that aren't mysterious, they are just part of human social dynamics. From that vantage point you can get a better sense of what you can change to influence outcomes and whether you can or can't in a particular context.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#4I went in agreeing with the headline, and the article just didn't follow through on it (also, thank god for readability view. 2560 pixels wide lines with no margin are not any more readable than blogs full of ads). So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly abnormal ? Even in one of the very first paragraphs, "the company whose culture is so odd tha…
Curious, as a European, what do you find wrong with some of the practices in SV? Genuinely interested in hearing your perspective (perhaps if you elaborate and keep it objective as possible you'll avoid some of the mass downvotes).
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#5I went in agreeing with the headline, and the article just didn't follow through on it (also, thank god for readability view. 2560 pixels wide lines with no margin are not any more readable than blogs full of ads). So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly abnormal ? Even in one of the very first paragraphs, "the company whose culture is so odd tha…
Curious, as a European, what do you find wrong with some of the practices in SV? Genuinely interested in hearing your perspective (perhaps if you elaborate and keep it objective as possible you'll avoid some of the mass downvotes).
If you're really curious, you can take a look at my post history - if you go far back enough you might find a few rants on it.
But it has a lot to do with culture. Adopted traits that are only there to serve themselves. And since culture is by definition subjective, I can't really say anything bad about it now, can I?
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#6I can't read this because my ISP's (I assume) scheme of MITMing all http traffic is buggy, and now I can only load things over https.
Start using encryption, people. There's no reason not to.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#7This reminds me that I've acclimatised to one specific test in the PHP interpreter test suite always failing on OS X. I should go and make it either not run on OS X, or modify it so it will actually pass.
That way, when someone eventually actually breaks that function, they'll notice.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#8The paper on "normalization of deviance" that this post links to is also really good. It's written from a medicine perspective, but its observations and conclusions are pretty generalizable.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#9I can't read this because my ISP's (I assume) scheme of MITMing all http traffic is buggy, and now I can only load things over https. Start using encryption, people. There's no reason not to.
As someone trying to get a free SSL cert from LetsEncrypt right now, I'd say that it still has some way to go before it becomes frictionless :) (getting there quite fast though)
Otherwise, the reason becomes $$$ .
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#10I immediately thought of the "5 monkeys and a ladder" psychology study, in which the first monkey attempts to climb the ladder to get a banana and all of the monkeys are sprayed with water. Then one of the monkeys is replaced with a newcomer, who then tries to climb the ladder, but this time, the remaining original monkeys attack it. And so the replacing of the monkeys continues, until none of the monkeys knows what the deal with the ladder is and yet none attempt to climb it.
This is a popular story in dev/product culture but after a little more Googling, apparently it's apocryphal: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201...