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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#131

Post by andrewflnr »

apalmer wrote: post #98
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…

Leadership leads. This is a tautology. It is unhealthy to pretend otherwise. Lets take for Leadership decides to incur technical debt to allow a faster entry into market, Development Team Lead decides this is unacceptable, and does not take on the Technical Debt, but instead does things 'The Right Way'. This leads to competitors entering the market first, snagging customers and mindshare, which eventually leads to th…

GP is not pretending anything. Further, taking a position on technical tradeoffs (your example) is an orthogonal concern to defining leadership structure, which is also distinct from the possibility of making bottom-up changes. No one is proposing anarchy here, just people fixing what they can.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#132

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#133

Post by bpchaps »

acconsta wrote: post #82

> 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.

I used to work for a major financial exchange like this. When I joined, the root password was known by /everyone/. They also used telnet instead of ssh.

Another company I worked for used rot13 for their back end risk management system's password storage. Found it completely by accident when trying to add the platform I was supporting at the time. I had a setting to the effect of 'resolve data from defined functions' enabled, so every password stored would be resolved to plaintext instead of showing their 'hashes'. It was batshit scary - scariest being the production r/w credentials for the credit card and mortgage databases.

When I reported that one to the devs, they responded with, "We know. We needed to push the code out as quickly as possible, so we got lazy". Fuck. That.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#134

Post by enraged_camel »

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.

If this dichotomy exists -- if doing your job does not by definition make the organization better -- then that's a dysfunctional organization.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#135

Post by btown »

hyperpape wrote: post #17
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 becaus…

There is some nuance here, though. A lot of leadership that might seem to default to "we don't have time for that" can be more reasonable when the problem, and (critically) the monetary ROI of fixing the problem, is explained to them in terms they can use to justify to their bosses. Effective communication of technical best-practices to non-technical people is something that everyone can practice. Sometimes you'll have irrational bosses, and that's just life, but more often than not they're just too busy to understand technical things, and it's still possible to spoon-feed them.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#137

Post by mmatants »

paulddraper wrote: post #129
klenwell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually come across this scenario quite often in retail outlets with poorly designed queue layouts (e.g. an H&M with with 2-4 registers behind a long counter and a single ad-hoc queue lined up in front of one of them). My reasoning is a little different (and a little more charitable I suppose in its generalization about human nature): I don't want to go step in front of the register with no one waiting in it becau…

tl;dr Thank goodness for sociopathic jerks

The other tl;dr is that managers need to know and buy into concepts of group psychology.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#138

Post by mahouse »

dfc wrote: post #27

This post's style and "quality" of writing is really aggravating. I felt like I was banging my head against the wall after reading so many run on sentences or paragraphs that start with the same contraction. Other times the writing is so poorly executed I cannot tell what the author is trying to convey. For example what is going on in this paragraph: "There’s the company with a reputation for having great engineering…

It's convoluted and "hard to read" for a reason. The author wants to make a point by writing all sentences using the same style. If you don't see it...

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#139

Post by jkestner »

paulddraper wrote: post #129
klenwell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually come across this scenario quite often in retail outlets with poorly designed queue layouts (e.g. an H&M with with 2-4 registers behind a long counter and a single ad-hoc queue lined up in front of one of them). My reasoning is a little different (and a little more charitable I suppose in its generalization about human nature): I don't want to go step in front of the register with no one waiting in it becau…

tl;dr Thank goodness for sociopathic jerks

Progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#140

Post by jerf »

geodel wrote: post #66
jerf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for this. I have used somewhat similar approach and ended up writing bunch of testing tools for our app over a period. I can see its effectiveness as quite a few people in our team and outside started using them, or made their own copy and modified for their needs. Now I am better off as a developer but appreciation in term monetary compensation / promotion did not come through. However unlike others I do not…

Well, sounds like you're doing your part, it's just the legal system screwing you up.

I wanted to tack on that while the "change jobs for de facto promotion" technique is solid and time tested, doing the sort of stuff I mentioned can help you climb faster. If you're planning on that career path, that's great skill development. You may still advance if you just clock time in before moving on, but you'll find you don't advance as far and that you seem to be getting the same job over and over. (At least, statistically.)

Best of luck with the visa issues. If nothing else, keep an eye on the long term. Development today may still pay off later.

(I mean, don't go crazy. I'm not big into unpaid work. But not all "eight hours" are created equal.)

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