How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#11

Post by PaulKeeble » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:37 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

This 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.

Its a broken window, if you don't fix it people have permission to just have tests that fail, they get used to seeing a failure that 2 failures isn't an issue and pretty soon real problems that would be caught by the tests aren't fixed anymore.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#12

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

michaelfeathers wrote: post #3

nor·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…

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#13

Post by arjie » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:38 PM UTC

jwmerrill wrote: post #8

The 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. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821100/

Sidney Dekker's _The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'_ has a bit about this (which he calls drift). One thing I liked in that section is a sort of anti-Murphy's Law: What can go wrong will usually go right, and then we'll assume that it will go right again and again, even if we borrow more from our safety margin.

That said, it's a trade-off, and if you're a startup, it's usually far better to do it dirty today than perfect next year.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#14

Post by johngalt » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

Sometimes a new person comes in saying "WTF WTF WTF Wtf wtf..." because you don't have the messed up practices that they expect.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#15

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business.

My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining so hard to fix things that are bigger than me. If you don't like your managers, or the culture, or the business, find another place to work, it's that simple. If you can't do that, you're simply going to have to learn how to compromise.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#16

Post by hyperpape » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:40 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #12

michaelfeathers wrote: post #3

nor·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…

[deleted]

Eat as fast as possible, (with plausible effect of vomiting soon after--not part of the definition, just a common effect).

It's a word in American English, just not super common.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#17

Post by hyperpape » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #15

Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business. My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining…

You're conflating two things. One is the principle that engineering needs are only really important as far as they serve some business need. As a developer, I don't love this, because I'd like to be able to work on whatever I found useful, but it's true.

The second thing is people ignoring opportunities to make engineering changes that would be beneficial for both engineering and business reasons. They do this because "it's not how it's done" or "it's impossible" or "we don't have time for that". And this is a problem that affects both engineers and leadership. Some changes can't be done because leadership doesn't allocate the resources, some can't be done because people on the ground don't give a shit.

Since there are problems that can't be solved without leadership buy-in, you're definitely right that you can't fix these problems without having a role where you have a real ability to change the culture, and that you should be realistic about that.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#18

Post by danso » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

jwmerrill wrote: post #8

The 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. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2821100/

Thanks for this...lots of great examples...the one about the stoned-out music student who, as a museum guard, accidentally enabled a ~$500 million art heist, was a good laugh, with links to more interesting reports and post-mortems.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#19

Post by apalmer » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #15

Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business. My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining…

This is my thinking also... it came to me over a long time, and typically has a lot to do with why I switch jobs. At a certain point i give up struggling against the 'WTF' and just start going along with the flow, then one day i look at the stuff i am doing, realize working at the place is making me a worse professional, and move along...

However I do want to note that in general these things do have real concrete negative impacts on the bottomline of the organization.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#20

Post by EdwardCoffin » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #2

I 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…

You said "So it posits that there's messed up practices considered normal, then it talks about companies that are clearly abnormal?", but isn't that the point of the article, that clearly abnormal is subjective, and talks about how the people in the companies become blind to that?