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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#161

Post by Retric »

asuffield wrote: post #124
mikekchar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the lesson to learn from this is to be wary of anybody who says they can look at a system for organising people that works well and write down a recipe for how to reproduce the essential elements of that system. Even if they were partially responsible for creating it. Most likely, nobody understands why it works in enough detail to write down precisely what it would take to reproduce it.

One of the hardest parts of this is organizations are not separate from there problem domain. A process that works for manufacturing cars (high value) may not work so well for manufacturing radios (low value) let alone banking software. Pay, education, and company size are all huge factors that are often ignored.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#163

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

bmn_ wrote: post #71
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #7

This reminds me that I've acclimatised to one specific test in the PHP interpreter test suite always failing on OS X. I should go and make it either not run on OS X, or modify it so it will actually pass. That way, when someone eventually actually breaks that function, they'll notice.

A nice thought, but pointless. Failing tests do not matter to the PHP release managers, they ship it anyway. http://redd.it/qeq7k#c3z0vva

That's nonsense, PHP releases ship with no failing tests. That's from three years ago, and anyway gcov.php.net is not used for CI these days (IIRC it's an abandoned old box, its results are inaccurate), Travis is. The PHP-7.0 and PHP-5.6 branches are currently green on Travis.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#164

Post by lnanek2 »

klenwell wrote: post #126
mattkevan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, scientifically, one queue for all registers is the superior solution. It reduces wait times for customers in general vs. one queue for each register (where one of the lines might get stuck for a long time). That's why you find banks and other places are all setup to have one queue used by all the clerks. The only real problem with H&M is that they haven't put stuff in the way of people forming multiple lines when keeping them in one line is the best practice.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#165

Post by bboreham »

mattkevan wrote: post #90
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.

Queueing theory shows that one queue with multiple servers is better than one queue per server.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#166

Post by geon »

klenwell wrote: post #151
slavik81 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand how that continues for very long. Once the clerks no longer have customers, they can just call people over and the queue will redistribute. If they're not doing that, presumably it's because they're doing something else that takes priority, like replacing the till or handling a problem with a previous transaction. It only seems like it would be a problem at businesses with bad staff.

In my experience, clerks tend to circumvent the issue by simply yelling out, to no one in particular, something like "Next in line!" I've also noticed the acquired habit in more experienced retail staff, when confronted with a queue of indeterminate order, to say, "I can help the next customer in line" and leaving implementation of the next method as an exercise for the customers themselves. FWIW, I find the best arr…

Here, clercs use o say something like "This register is also open.", and a new line will form.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#167

Post by mgrennan »

Then There is the story of the Emperor's new clothes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

Sometime older works or those in exit interview, just don't GAF and call "group think" what it is.

You want to fix these problems. Don't hose your monkeys and hire some old deep thinkers and empower them.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#168

Post by ghettoimp »

danso wrote: post #39
draw_down wrote: post #24

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…

Yeah...I mostly have experience only running test suites for popular libraries and for my own software...but the existence of this library is a massive WTF...such that had I read its official introductory post, I would have thought it to be really good satire: https://www.box.com/blog/introducing-flaky-a-nose-test-plugi... Can someone describe a real life production scenario in which this flaky behavior is desirable?…

"Can someone describe a real life production scenario in which this flaky behavior is desirable?"

I think so? My company develops a processor that is meant to be compatible with processors from other vendors. To try to ensure compatibility, we have a test suite that compares our "golden model" of intended behavior against the observed behavior of competitors' chips.

We sometimes have run into cases where a competitor's product "randomly" gets wrong results, but when we run the instruction again, it gets the right answer. This happens frequently enough that we've arranged the test suite to automatically try again to see if a failure is reproducible before bothering a human with it.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#169

Post by zem »

bboreham wrote: post #165
mattkevan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Queueing theory shows that one queue with multiple servers is better than one queue per server.

there's also a great story i heard about a queueing theory conference where a hundred or so academics turned up at once, and insisted on forming a single line at the hotel registration desk because that was the proper way to do it.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#170

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Being smart enough not to mess with problem X of company Y doesn't mean I don't find it interesting to inquire about how problem X came along.
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