How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#101

Post by apalmer » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #62

vinceguidry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The DoD (!) is hardly representative of the cultures being discussed in the linked article, which is about tech startups (with a bunch of examples from medicine too). Yes, there are worse examples, but those may be beyond help.

Tech start ups are a rather small part of the overall IT industry. I dont really have the numbers to back it up, so i am not going to speculate as far as the actual numbers, but any discussiona bout workplace IT that ignores everything that isnt a tech start up is virtually useless.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#102

Post by moonchrome » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:39 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…

>apparently it's apocryphal

It sounds like a fable. I know that primates are smarter than other animals but I doubt that without some strong negative association they would be able to keep up that convention when there's an obvious prize right there, especially if they got hungry.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#103

Post by bordercases » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

agiamas wrote: post #96

calinet6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah there are a gazillion companies that claim to be Lean, Kaizen or what else but guess what, in practice only a small fraction actually are :)

That seems like something that is worth (tactfully) screening for in interviews when given the opportunity to respond.

So instead of asking "are you Kaizen?" you would ask about practices performed that imply Kaizen, including the spirit of the law and not the letter.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#104

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

agiamas wrote: post #96

calinet6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah there are a gazillion companies that claim to be Lean, Kaizen or what else but guess what, in practice only a small fraction actually are :)

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#105

Post by gherkin0 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

> This is a problem even when cultures discourage meanness and encourage feedback: cultures of niceness seem to have as many issues around speaking up as cultures of meanness, if not more. In some places, people are afraid to speak up because they’ll get attacked by someone mean. In others, they’re afraid because they’ll be branded as mean. It’s a hard problem.

That's a really good insight, and it's something to keep in mind with all the recent controversy about development cultures.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#106

Post by apalmer » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:44 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #33

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…

There's a variety of things you can still do as a middle-tier or above engineer to try to change the situation. (Very junior engineers are advised to A: watch how the situation develops with those poor practices and learn and if ambitious B: find a mid-tier or above engineer to ally with for these matters. You lack the social capital on your own to do much.) In my experience, at least with my development style, writi…

This is absolutely true. However I just generally dont see the point in 'fighting' superiors... its not that its impossible to fight the system and make things right, its just not a good investment of an individual contributors time and effort. much better investment to move to an organization that is either already aligned with positive processes or actively seeking to improve processes.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#107

Post by coderzach » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

devonkim wrote: post #97

taurath wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a corollary the moment someone breaks an "unbreakable" record in many sports that record can sometimes be frequently broken right after.

Competitive eating is a great example of this. Never really thought this carried over in general to other forms of sport / competition.

The best example I can think of is in middle distance running, when Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#108

Post by mikekchar » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #88

shalmanese wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hesitated to reply to this because what I'm about to say could be taken as pedantic. However, it is my experience that many people experience a good way of working, apply a label to it and then use that label thinking that it will communicate all of the good things that they intended. This is rarely the case. At some point you see many articles entitled "Why X doesn't work" where they describe a broken version of X and why it doesn't work. The broken version ends up getting more popular than the unbroken version for some reason and there is a general consensus that "X doesn't work and anyone that uses X is an idiot", even though X works perfectly fine if you use it correctly.

With that in mind, "lean" as a principle is organized around the idea that it is better have people request functionality (pull) than for you to imagine what people want and then try to sell it (push). Many "lean" organizations happen to be very good at continuous improvement, but you can be "lean" without any capability for improvement.

"Kaizen" is the Japanese word for continuous improvement. It was introduced to western eyes primarily from the "Toyota Way", which is a lean manufacturing system that concentrates on continuous improvement. It is important to understand, though, that while workers have a responsibility for identifying problems, it is the managers who are responsible for working with the workers to implement improvements in the Toyota way. So there are clear demarcations of responsibility, unlike many of the IT processes that borrow the word "kaizen".

Even "continuous improvement" can be a loaded term with respect to responsibilities. The first time I ran across the term was dealing with CMM (the Capability Maturity Model). Once you are up to level 4 or 5 you are using metrics to improve your process in order to obtain continuous improvement. In every organization I've seen that attempted to achieve CMM level 4 or above, the primary driver was management (and often workers were not even consulted about improvements or why they were necessary -- they were only told to do things a certain way). I'm not saying it was successful, but it was very common ;-)

I guess my point is that if you are lucky enough to be working on a team that does continuous improvement well, be aware that what you call "Lean" or "Kaizen" is unlikely to be what other people call it. You can not communicate what it is you want to communicate using those words alone. If you have been reading literature using these words and believe that if you simple follow a "Lean" system and embrace "Kaizen" that you will transform your organization into one that does continuous improvement well, I'm sorry to burst your bubble. If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, all the difficult problems are people problems and those problems almost always require unique solutions. It can be quite tricky no matter what you are doing.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#109

Post by vinceguidry » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #50

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…

> To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. Ultimately what "they're paying you" for is not so specific. Generally, leadership doesn't have the skills to know there is a problem. Even in the cases where the leadership is technically exceptional, there is no way they can consider the myriad technical decisions and how they affect the future of the business. Maybe leadership stil…

> Ultimately what "they're paying you" for is not so specific.

I think you'd find in most organizations, roles are well-defined, but not articulated to those assuming those roles, because it helps morale to let employees define themselves, and also keeps them from getting too complacent. A manager's job is not to lead but to manage, i.e. get the greatest possible output from the employee.

If you want to know what your defined role is, a simple way to do so is to simply stop doing your job and seeing what people complain about first.

You're right in that leadership can not know the intricacies of your domain, but you're wrong in assuming there's something special about that state of affairs as it concerns technology. Leadership does not know the intricacies of, say, human resources, that's why they hire a specialist. Even in areas where the leadership does know how to do the grunt worker's job, their attention isn't focused on that area, so they're not going to know about problems until someone, typically a manager, brings it up.

A company's leadership is typically engaged outward, towards the broader market. Our CEO handles big deals with other service providers and retail outlets. If you think about medieval Europe, the petri dish that modern organizational methods evolved in, it makes sense. Someone needs to keep tabs on what the neighboring states are doing, that someone needs all the resources of the nation at his disposal at his command so he can deal with regional situations.

Individual contributors, when they try to "rock the boat", are perceived as unnecessarily taking time away from the much more important job of keeping tabs on the broader world / market. It's not directly making the company more competitive, so it's just noise, is the attitude.

The attitude / culture I described above is the norm, everything else is an exception. You can take this paradigm, and use it carve out a little fiefdom in any traditional hierarchical organization. Essentially, you figure out your defined role, do only the minimum required to not get fired, and devote the rest of your time to company politics. As you come to understand the organization and its needs, you'll be able to position yourself as someone who can meet those needs. If a company needs it, then that means it can't get it with the current resources it has, otherwise it would have it already. So you will need a budget and staff.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#110

Post by calinet6 » Wed, Dec 30, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

bordercases wrote: post #103

agiamas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah there are a gazillion companies that claim to be Lean, Kaizen or what else but guess what, in practice only a small fraction actually are :)

That seems like something that is worth (tactfully) screening for in interviews when given the opportunity to respond. So instead of asking "are you Kaizen?" you would ask about practices performed that imply Kaizen, including the spirit of the law and not the letter.

Yep - this is something that I'm thinking about actively. How do you start the conversation in an interview (as either interviewer or interviewee) that gives you insight into how people treat problems? Is their instinct more individual or systemic? Do they naturally look for improvement, or point fingers?

I've had some success, but they're always very deep interviews, which can either be drastically good or quite startling to the other party depending on what direction it goes. So your note to do it 'tactfuflly' is very prudent.