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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

danluu.com

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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#51

Post by pcote »

apalmer wrote: post #19
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 ne…

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

Not true. Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations.

U.S. prisons are just one of many such examples of this. A concrete positive impact would be lower incarceration and re-offending rates. American prisons have the exact opposite effect. This leads to lots of "customers" in the form of prisoners and victims seeking a more abstract "sense of justice".

The American prison system is probably not the only industry with that kind of business model. There are, no doubt, many contexts where a "concrete negative impact" can be very good for the bottomline. It's also an important lesson about making money in general. It's not about creating value. It's about making others pay for your actions regardless of whether or not said actions are "positive".

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#52

Post by humanrebar »

superuser2 wrote: post #48
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…

Companies have business needs to not go down and to not lose customer data, both of which are very real consequences of poor engineering practice. Managers are also acclimated to the business's practices and may find others absurd. The essay is suggesting that hey would be better managers were they to listen to the WTFs from newcomers.

Yes, and beyond that, engineers have ethical responsibilities to make sure they follow the golden rule when handling customer data.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#53

Post by mod »

lmm wrote: post #37
draw_down wrote: post #24

This post seems so good and so self-evidently true that I'm surprised at the amount of pushback it's getting here. Not sure what else to say about it. Well, I'll say this- the "@flaky" thing is pretty mind-blowing. In my own company I have noticed many engineers have a disturbing level of comfort with deciding something is a "mystery". There are no mysteries in what we do. The test fails because something is fucked u…

I think it corresponds to a lot of normal practice - even if you don't use @flaky, if one build fails and you run it again and it passes, what do you do? It's very possible to build tests that will pass sometimes if the code is correct and fail always if the code is wrong (e.g. test where there are race conditions in mock initialization, test that asserts that rows come out of a database in the same order they were p…

> if one build fails and you run it again and it passes, what do you do?

I run it a third time, to start.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#54

Post by vinceguidry »

shalmanese wrote: post #47
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 exactly a perfect example of WTF worthy behavior being treated as totally normal; that it's encoded that there's "leadership" and "not leadership" as binary job distinctions with distinct responsibilities. I've been in both types of cultures and, by far the healthier culture was the one in which "making the organization better" was treated as everyone's responsibility. I've seen very junior engineers drive qu…

> If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current situation and seeing things again with clear eyes.

I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope do so at risk of offending other stakeholders. They may tolerate you and even give some limited help, but they're not going to shout your name from the rooftops just because you want to be a boy scout.

Not saying you can't buck the system and get away with it, one of my favorite books was about one of my heroes, John Boyd, but if you want to be a hero, you need to go into it with a clear-eyed assessment of what you're up against and so you can tailor your objectives appropriately.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#55

Post by sageikosa »

momzer wrote: post #49
hyperpape wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little bit awkward. Still, I find it oddly fascinating that you're confused, because I can't figure out what's confusing. There is a company Dan Luu knows about. This company has a reputation for great engineering practices. This company had 2 9s of reliability when Dan last checked. The reason it has 2 9s of reliability is a predictable result of its engineering practices. Although this example is about a spe…

The unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.

Right. 99% is an A+ in school and 3 days of downtime per year.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#56

Post by humanrebar »

pcote wrote: post #51
apalmer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

> However I do want to note that in general these things do have real concrete negative impacts on the bottomline of the organization. Not true. Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations. U.S. prisons are just one of many such examples of this. A concrete positive impact would be lower incarceration and re-offending rates. American prisons have the exact opposite effect. This lea…

The customers of prisons aren't prisoners or taxpayers. It's the people who decide to spend money on facilities and salaries.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#57

Post by cjcenizal »

SCAQTony wrote: post #35

This line perplexed and disturbed me: "...This is the same company where someone recently explained to me how great it is that, instead of using data to make decisions, we use political connections, and that the idea of making decisions based on data is a myth anyway; no one does that...." One, that is depressing and implies the company seems to have a corrupting influence on society at large. Two. The girl is right…

From the context, I think the author was probably referring to office politics, not corrupt politicians.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#58

Post by vinceguidry »

pcote wrote: post #51
apalmer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

> However I do want to note that in general these things do have real concrete negative impacts on the bottomline of the organization. Not true. Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations. U.S. prisons are just one of many such examples of this. A concrete positive impact would be lower incarceration and re-offending rates. American prisons have the exact opposite effect. This lea…

> Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations.

That's a very good point too. If you wander, unaware, into a quest to change something with negative externalities on workers or the public at large but with a positive effect on the business, you'll find yourself suddenly in a minefield of opposition with a target painted on your back and no idea who you've just made enemies of. Tread very carefully.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#59

Post by pjungwir »

draw_down wrote: post #24

This post seems so good and so self-evidently true that I'm surprised at the amount of pushback it's getting here. Not sure what else to say about it. Well, I'll say this- the "@flaky" thing is pretty mind-blowing. In my own company I have noticed many engineers have a disturbing level of comfort with deciding something is a "mystery". There are no mysteries in what we do. The test fails because something is fucked u…

It depends. I recall one project with flaky tests, and shortly after joining I decided to investigate. It turned out to be a problem with floating-point values in the shopping cart logic. Tests were using random item prices, so sometimes it appeared and sometimes not. I'm glad I found that one. :-)

On the other hand I've seen something like @flaky used in the Ruby world to run Capybara tests with a lot of Ajax, where you get failures because of timing issues deep down inside Selenium. It's not a problem with production or your app, but your testing tools.

In the second case I still am not totally comfortable, since it makes it easier to overlook flaky tests that really do need attention, but I can understand it there.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#60

Post by cubano »

My personal hottake is that, as Einstein proved, everything really is relative.

What may seem dysfunctional and WTF from your vantage point may be perfectly logical from someone elses.

If you are going thru your work-life with the idea that social relationships and business practices are always going to follow the same strict rules as your software or hardware does, well good luck with that.

Normal is as normal does.

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