How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#241

Post by rincebrain » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:30 PM UTC

draw_down wrote: post #146

rincebrain wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree because things like flappy tests are a "smell" that could lead to discovering a deeper problem. We simply don't know ahead of time that the payoff won't be worth the effort in such a situation. If you can't explain what's wrong, that's bad.

Certainly, but given that the value of the test can be nonzero even if unreliable, and you may not have time to run down why it's unreliable, it makes sense to have a mechanism to utilize it.

Not ever having engineering time to investigate why it's unreliable is a (mostly) unrelated problem.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#242

Post by seunosewa » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:35 PM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #225

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…

I presume that one of the problems with one queue for all registers is that people will perceive it as a longer line. A five person line at a particular register doesn't seem as bad as a fifty person line for all ten registers.

People quickly learn that it's better.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#243

Post by theGimp » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:43 PM UTC

karlkatzke wrote: post #25

The author detailed precisely why I left a former Y-Combinator company, Return Path. "As far as I can tell, what happens at these companies is that they started by concentrating almost totally on product growth. That’s completely and totally reasonable, because companies are worth approximately zero when they’re founded; they don’t bother with things that protect them from losses, like good ops practices or actually…

You didn't have to name the company.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#244

Post by nyan4 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #173

paulddraper wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr Thank goodness for sociopathic jerks

I've long held the theory that humans have differing degrees of rudeness because it breaks deadlocks like "after you", subdivide-or-finish the divisible food item, and who takes the last piece. (In places that were too polite, I have seen the last piece of a cake go stale uneaten.)

You clearly don't understand the meaning of "sociopathic"

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#245

Post by devonkim » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

antrix wrote: post #187

devonkim wrote: post #77

There seems to be a bit of a false dichotomy underpinning this article that companies value feature growth above all else and this directly results in poor operational performance. However, you can get terrible availability without delivering any features whatsoever for months and months. Two 9s of availability? Half the customers I've had would be ecstatic to have even ONE 9 of availability. And those guys hardly ev…

> And those guys hardly ever ship any code due to how encumbered developers typically are in those places and release maybe once every 6 months to a year perhaps. I've worked in places where some teams ship with this three or six month frequency. They consider it completely normal and find ideas like continuously delivery or even weekly deployments as not just abnormal but risky and irresponsible! This is the very po…

I agree with you plenty that this shouldn't be acceptable, but most of the people I've seen that are against modern practices of decent software teams are not so much examples of the points in this article as much as stereotypical examples of one's grandparents or parents trying to tell you how your job doesn't matter because software isn't "real work" and that their principles work just fine today as it did in the 70s. Or they expect that continuous delivery / CI is a product or feature of something else they bought for 9+ figures and that it's something that you bundle in with services and a license cost because that's literally all they know as how to make anything happen. Doing software projects with people that have more experience in medieval architecture would be probably more pleasant and productive than dealing with leadership that have decades of experience doing nothing but big company projects with more resources spent on planning software than on engineering talent.

If a company is hell-bent on focusing for development and new features over stability / security, that's something that can be fixed by leadership - I've worked with plenty of companies that turned themselves around and have wise leaders that know that it's time to spend the resources to do spring cleaning while trying to keep existing employees excited by feature development happy.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#246

Post by yekim » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:08 PM UTC

kyllo wrote: post #220

ryandrake wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are getting so many replies disagreeing with you. Narrowly-defined roles are indeed the norm, even in the tech world. When I was an "individual contributor" I'd get frustrated with Worst Practices all the time, but was told that I was hired to write code not to change our infrastructure or suggest different product features or improve our testing practices--MANAGEMENT makes those decisions. But even…

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. One thing I would consider doing, if I ever start my own company or rise high enough up in someone else's company to implement this, is to give every single employee some sort of discretionary…

This is a very interesting idea. Have you, or anyone else on HN, ever seen this in action? I would LOVE to hear stories about this, either successes or failures.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#247

Post by calinet6 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

Illotus wrote: post #232

calinet6 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really disagree, strongly. It takes time and perseverance, but you can spread better ways of working.

The job would really need to be worth it to work against pushback from above.

That part's true. It's probably almost always easier to find a better environment.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#248

Post by dang » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 6:23 PM UTC

nyan4 wrote: post #244

JulianMorrison wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long held the theory that humans have differing degrees of rudeness because it breaks deadlocks like "after you", subdivide-or-finish the divisible food item, and who takes the last piece. (In places that were too polite, I have seen the last piece of a cake go stale uneaten.)

You clearly don't understand the meaning of "sociopathic"

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Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#249

Post by yourapostasy » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

raarts wrote: post #234

MarkPNeyer wrote: post #40

so many of these problems have the same root cause: we don't have an effective data driven reputation system. we use gameable heuristics to track social capial. when metrics for evaluation are flawed, people behave in ways that exploit the flaws even if they increase the likelihood of failure. "we are not rewarded for necessary grunt work as much as shiny advances", for example. That's a failure of the reputation sys…

In the past few years I have been building up good reputation at various stores both online and offline. It bothers me I cannot use that reputation. For example a major supermarket chain here in The Netherlands rolled out self scanning from 2006[1]. They do random checks at the checkout, and for many years now they know I never forget to scan something. This resulted in the amount of random checks going down for me.…

The challenge is getting the companies to (from their perspective) "share" the trust information with the world, which includes their competitors.

I suspect we might need a "taxonomy of trust" so to speak, that allows the trust data to be anonymized and aggregated into commonly-accepted meanings of trust contexts, trust roles, trust relationships, etc. That might let these companies to release the trust data into such a format through a blockchain perhaps, and be able to participate in consuming the aggregated data. I'd need someone well-versed in game theory to figure out if an advantage is conferred to "leeches"; a company in such a scenario who only consumes the aggregated data but never send into the blockchain what they accumulate on their own customers. I think that's a real danger with such a scheme, but am not sure how to strongly dissuade that behavior.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#250

Post by accountatwork » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 7:05 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #6

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.

This is an odd post to voice that complaint on, since the site supports HTTPS.