Key point: "The simplest option is to just do the right thing yourself and ignore what’s going on around you."
This is so, so, so easy to do and generally has no negative repurcussions.
How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
111–120 of 267 posts
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#112Earlier 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…
> 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…
Was it the Robert Coram book (https://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com/books/665-boyd-...)?
That book made it into four different reading lists from various branches of the military (USMC, USAF, Army, and a chair of the House Armed Svcs Committee). That's encouraging in that at least they're aware that his ideas/approaches were productive.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#113Earlier 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.
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…
Part of the extreme difficulty in defining a mental model for an organization is that organizations are necessarily complex systems. You're exactly right.
Regarding people problems, my one note is that we are all more alike than we seem, and you eventually start to see the same classes of problems everywhere. This is why an understanding of psychology and behavior is so critical.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#114"There’s the office where I asked one day about the fact that I almost never saw two particular people in the same room together. I was told that they had a feud going back a decade, and that things had actually improved – for years, they literally couldn’t be in the same room because one of the two would get too angry and do something regrettable, but things had now cooled to the point where the two could, occasionally, be found in the same wing of the office or even the same room. These weren’t just random people, either. They were the two managers of the only two teams in the office. Normal!"
I'm 99% certain that I know about whom the author refers here, having worked at an office with somebody of the same name where a drama matching this description took place. It was one profoundly weird situation that should never have been allowed to fester.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#115"There’s the office where I asked one day about the fact that I almost never saw two particular people in the same room together. I was told that they had a feud going back a decade, and that things had actually improved – for years, they literally couldn’t be in the same room because one of the two would get too angry and do something regrettable, but things had now cooled to the point where the two could, occasiona…
Thanks for stoking the fire of my curiosity.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#116Most 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 don't think you have to compromise much. If you have any self-worth, you'll strive for improvement. You don't have even have to that careful about rubbing folks the wrong way. You're not going to get fired or anything.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#117This 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.
I hope so for that is less corrupt. I can be somewhat obtuse. I am going to write the author and ask. Thank you.
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. 99% is an A+ in school and 3 days of downtime per year.
That's about the reliability of my home server. A set of commodity mid-to-low quality parts that I assembled and programmed to turn on after a power outage. And I could easily double it (as in half the unavailable time) if any ok ISP become available at my place.
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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And the IT industry is a rather small part of the overall job market. So therefore any discussion about the workplace that ignores everything that isn't IT is virtually useless?
Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
#120> There’s the company with a reputation for having great engineering practices that had 2 9s of reliability last time I checked, for reasons that are entirely predictable from their engineering practices. This is the second thing in a row that’s basically anonymous because multiple companies find it to be normal. Multiple companies find practices that lead to 2 9s of reliability to be completely and totally normal. I…
Is the implication that 2 9s are really bad, mediocre, or some other negative judgment in this context? I'm familiar with a lot of places that have trouble with even 1 9 of reliability with lots of capital but terrible culture despite employing lots of operational controls and some best practices that have trouble with one 9, so even 2 9s sounds like a dream sometimes and the way that Dan Luu worded this article make…
It's pretty clear from the context that the author finds 2 9s of reliability unacceptable.