141–150 of 267 posts
I can't read this because my ISP's (I assume) scheme of MITMing all http traffic is buggy, and now I can only load things over https. Start using encryption, people. There's no reason not to.
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Did you give them a ton of advance warning when you left? http://www.onlyonceblog.com/2013/09/how-to-quit-your-job
I left it open-ended, actually. I talked to the CDO and explained why I was leaving. He agreed with the decision and thanked me for being brave enough to stand up and say it. It ended up being three weeks before we agreed that I'd successfully handed off everything. No bad feelings either way -- I'd joined the company because they had said that they wanted to 'grow up,' but that was a feeling percolating up from belo…
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.
Einstein proved nothing like this.
Perhaps I was being a bit too abstract, but I stand by my assertion.
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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…
However, this is not to say that in regular administration there isn't still a lot of de facto trust in the hierarchy. I think unbounded hierarchy is generally one of those memes that people grow up taking for granted as something that just works with any layer count. In some ways, it's a self-reinforcing thing - if you climbed ranks for 10 years, you don't want to see the system change and your "sunk cost" go away.
[edit: clarified sentence]
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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.
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…
It only seems like it would be a problem at businesses with bad staff.
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 agree, but with a caveat - there's an important time/value tradeoff to going down any particular rabbit hole where you have more tasks than time to expend on them, particularly if you're in a billable or result-oriented area, and it lacks obvious benefit. There are plenty of times I've seen people think of things as "well, it just does X" because of a lack of depth of knowledge, but you also can't necessarily go do…
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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…
To be honest, how often does this actually happen? I'd doubt it happens often enough to worry about it. Most startups aren't doing anything that special, and so this whole, "We have to move at twice the speed of light or we're all dead!" attitude doesn't belong anywhere.
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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. Oh absolutely. But your duty to that organization is to raise these issues to the person best-equipped to see the bigger picture, and to do your best to convince him it's a real problem. Once you've done that, your work is done , you have just done more to help your organization than…
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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…
There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.
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.