How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#201

Post by JimboOmega » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 1:07 AM UTC

pcote wrote: post #51

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…

> However I do want to note that in general these things do have real concrete negative impacts on the bottomline of the organization. Not true. Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations. U.S. prisons are just one of many such examples of this. A concrete positive impact would be lower incarceration and re-offending rates. American prisons have the exact opposite effect. This lea…

Classically if doing contract software work, bug-ridden software meant a secure maintenance contract for years to come.

Though when I got out of that sort of thing, I recall there being (relatively) new rules requiring a different entity to do the maintenance from the ones that created the software... but my understanding of FAR is basically non-existent, so I don't know.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#202

Post by Retra » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 1:40 AM UTC

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…

I would strongly disagree with you on both points -- that you're getting paid to do a job, and that you have to be paid to be a leader.

For one, you don't become a leader by being paid to be a leader. That's how you end up as an incompetent manager. You become a leader by taking responsibility and doing what you can to ensure those responsibilities are taken care of. One of those responsibilities is to make your organization better.

And you shouldn't think you're getting paid to do a job. I'm going to do a job whether I get paid by my employer or not. What I'm getting paid for is to take my employers priorities and goals into consideration, and the strength of that consideration is proportional to the pay. If you don't pay me very much, my priorities will be considered first, and one of my priorities from a workplace is to be comfortable and happy within a good organization -- I will work to help and support my friends and coworkers. So that's what I'll focus on. If you want me to 'just do a job' or 'maximize company profits', you need to pay me extra, because I won't care about those things for cheap.

You must be miserable at work if you think you're getting paid to just do labor. That's a waste of an education, assuming you have one.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#203

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 1:46 AM UTC

dfc wrote: post #93

momzer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.

When you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#204

Post by stephengillie » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 1:52 AM 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 :)

At more than one company, "Agile development" means "the CEO gives his cell number to every customer, and Waterfall development happens very fast."

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#205

Post by dmourati » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:15 AM UTC

dman wrote: post #29

An anecdotal observation is that the worst offenders in terms of institutionalized bad practices also have a culture of failing upwards. ie incentive structures are setup in a way where you create your mess so fast that you get promoted and someone else has to deal with the aftermath of what you did. In such an environment slowing down to do the right thing invariably means that you are setting yourself up to inherit…

Ooh, that's insidious and has the ring of truth to it. I've never thought about that before.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#206

Post by ianamartin » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:20 AM UTC

I want to speak to one aspect of the wonderful article:

Listening to weak signals.

I'm about to do a shameless promotion for a book I have nothing to do with, but a book that has been a guiding light for me: Michael Lopp's Managing Humans

When I was reading the article I couldn't help but think of Lopp's advice about regular one-on-one meetings with each of the people on your team.

I think this is one of the points that Lopp intends for managers to be listening to during those meetings.

They aren't so much for feedback from the manager (as they are often treated), but more as opportunities for the manager to listen.

If I understand the book correctly, those one-on-one meetings are exactly the place where the managers are supposed to be listening for the "weak signals."

I am not an expert in every area of development, and yet I have somehow been inserted into a management role.

As Lopp explains very clearly, this happens often, and the single biggest thing you can do when that happens is care about being a manager. It's a different skill set than being an IC.

Recognize that, but don't get totally caught up in that. I don't think Lopp would disagree with anything in this article. I think, in fact, that following Lopp's ideas would lead to far fewer cases of WTF than what we see in the wild.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#207

Post by calinet6 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:32 AM UTC

harigov wrote: post #174

calinet6 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a system—and some systems are markets. A market is also a system. This is why it's important to know how to think in systems, and about psychology, statistics, variation, knowledge and everything else that influences systems—if you want to work in one. There's more to most systems than just incentives. They are a small part of what goes on.

Can you recommend some books on this? I have been trying to learn to think in systems, and find that to be the most useful skill to have.

I agree!

Donella Meadows is one of the most articulate writers and thinkers on systems. She is the easiest to learn the basics from: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1603580557

Same person, shorter, free, and condensed format: http://www.donellameadows.org/systems-thinking-resources/

Same author again, the final chapter from the book above: http://www.donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/

And if you only get one book on how to apply it to business, it's this one: http://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Handbook-Making-Things-Getting...

A more recent applied-systems-thinking manual for organizations that I've found hits home with more traditional managers (very useful): http://www.amazon.com/The-High-Velocity-Edge-Operational-Com...

Another good one that's a bit long-winded, but another set of applied examples: http://www.amazon.com/The-Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Organiza...

Senge, in the foreward of that book, gives almost all credit to W. Edwards Deming—who is the originator of many of the ideas of organizational systems thinking and how it integrates with Management. So, if you want to go deeper, Deming's book "Out of the Crisis" is a good tome.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#208

Post by vinceguidry » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:33 AM UTC

apalmer wrote: post #185

andrewflnr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, I think there are some unspsoken givens that I need to spell out to make my point clearer. Typically people resolve the issues that directly cause them pain pretty quickly if it is in their control. Further "control" requires understanding how the levers a party influences impact the obstacles that cause the pain. WTF level issues typically occur when the above conditions aren't met, usually that means the 'pain'…

One should always keep in mind that a WTF-level issue is very possibly a critical oversight on the issue-holder's side. Lots of things in the world appear very fucked up, but are in actuality slight improvements over even more fucked up states of affairs. One should endeavor to find out the history of the situation before jumping to judgment.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#209

Post by ignoramous » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

bewuethr wrote: post #178

lnanek2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 line…

It doesn't reduce average wait time, but the variance in wait times.

Well, it might bring down the average, but not as much as the variance, because the work is now load-balanced across multiple counters, more or less, evenly; and so, the productivity might be a bit on the higher side?

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#210

Post by lamby » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:42 AM 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

This shouldn't affect its value as a story, though.