How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#81

Post by Dr_tldr » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:44 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…

I appreciate your honesty, but I definitely would not want to work in a company where that was the prevailing attitude, nor would I hire someone who took that as their MO. It's a pragmatic policy for each individual, but it also leads to endless passing of the buck.

"What can I do, I'm just a dev, the team lead should figure it out" turns into:

"what can I do, I'm just team lead, the department head should figure it out" turns into:

"what can I do, I'm just the department head, the CTO/CEO should figure it out" which finally ends with:

"I'm just the CEO, these decisions should be made by the department heads and team leads because they have a better understanding of the problem."

Responsibility gets passed from the bottom to the top back down to the bottom, where the process repeats itself. Taken to its logical conclusion, everyone has a perfect rationalization for why all decisions are either too general or too specific for them to make. The net result is that decisions still get made, but no one questions them or defends them or even knows where they came from, because no one perceives them as a choice they had any influence over.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#82

Post by acconsta » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

> And I can think of more than one well-regarded unicorn where everyone still has access to basically everything, even after their first or second bad security breach.

Which companies? That's pretty scary.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#83

Post by yourapostasy » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #40

so many of these problems have the same root cause: we don't have an effective data driven reputation system. we use gameable heuristics to track social capial. when metrics for evaluation are flawed, people behave in ways that exploit the flaws even if they increase the likelihood of failure. "we are not rewarded for necessary grunt work as much as shiny advances", for example. That's a failure of the reputation sys…

I like this very much, thank you for bringing it up. Take a look at Fabriq [1; PDF], trying to accomplish similar in a blockchain context. I especially like the work you put into explicating the implied respect issue.

What are your thoughts modeling respect not just as a unitary quality (still highly useful for quick, ad hoc, high-level evaluation), but also along crowd-created and crowd-defined axes? Then people can refine their description of respect and for example, say they agree with one crowd-group's definition of "good manager" for a specific person, but at the same time that person is not respected as another crowd-group's definition of a "good leader".

Gaming reputation systems over extended time periods and via aliased entities is a perennial problem. What are your thoughts on random latencies before respect scoring is evaluated on new respect data for an entity, securely tying a hash based upon fully-sequenced DNA to real-person accounts, interaction of entities in a specific context (someone might be respected as a great athlete, considered toxic in one of the companies they own, but respected in a different company), and tracking corporate aliasing (through mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, name changes, etc.)?

[1] http://www.ourfabriq.com/fabriqwhitepaper_v20150520.pdf

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#84

Post by kps » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

cptskippy wrote: post #31

Speaking of completely messaged up... I had to add max-width, margin, and font-size styles before I could even attempt to read that page. For all that markup, there sure wasn't any attention payed to readability.

It's just plain HTML. That your browser doesn't display it readably is a good example of a completely messed up practice that people have come to believe is normal.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#85

Post by hyperpape » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

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.

Good point. I had assumed the parent was complaining about syntax, but that could be confusing.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#86

Post by calinet6 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:57 PM UTC

The funny part about the recent obsession with "normalization of deviance" is that it's just one of hundreds of psychological biases that people exhibit and that directly impact work.

This is why it's important to learn about psychology if you intend to work with humans—or even just with yourself.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#87

Post by kbenson » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 5:58 PM UTC

> It’s sort of funny that this ends up being a problem about incentives. As an industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers into doing what we want. But then we set up incentive systems that are generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things

The longer I live, the more I realize that everything is a market, and incentives control it all. The reason you follow company policy most the time? You're incentivized to follow the rules so you get the raise, or at lease don't get fired. When there are competing incentives for different responses to the same subject, that's when you need to take extra care to realign the incentives. Trying to institute new behavior? You have to fight momentum, familiarity, and sometimes easiness. That often requires more than a few dictates.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#88

Post by calinet6 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:00 PM UTC

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…

Yep. There's a whole philosophy based on the idea that improvement of the organization is everyone's job. It's called Lean, or more simply, continuous improvement or Kaizen.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#89

Post by calinet6 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #87

> It’s sort of funny that this ends up being a problem about incentives. As an industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers into doing what we want. But then we set up incentive systems that are generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things The longer I live, the more I realize that everything is a market, and incentives control it all. The reason you follow company…

Everything is a system—and some systems are markets. A market is also a system.

This is why it's important to know how to think in systems, and about psychology, statistics, variation, knowledge and everything else that influences systems—if you want to work in one.

There's more to most systems than just incentives. They are a small part of what goes on.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#90

Post by mattkevan » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #10

I 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…

It's a bit like when there's two cash machines, with a long queue at the first but no-one at the second.

You can see people looking at it, wondering whether it's worth the humiliation of finding it's broken and having to go to the back of the queue, or the joy of finding it is working and getting one over everyone else.

Often nobody cracks.