How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#261

Post by mike_hearn » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

yekim wrote: post #246

kyllo wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's called 20% time and it works OK. I always used it when I was at Google, although most people didn't.

20% is not specifically for "improving the organisation" of course. It's most famous on the outside for the new products it led to, like Gmail. But actually most 20% projects were small internal things intended to smooth the rough edges off a particular tool or process, or to improve the company in some way. If the particular bee in your bonnet was a type of bug that cropped up frequently in other people's software, making a linter to spot it and driving adoption through the organisation would be a good 20% project, for instance.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#262

Post by mike_hearn » Sat, Jan 02, 2016, 1:57 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.…

Well, watch out. That sounds great if you trust everyone you interact with to give you good reputation. But pretty quickly that can lead to the recent stories about the Chinese social credit (assuming the stories are true). It can become a very subtle and powerful way to control people. Not to mention a legal minefield. Just look at credit ratings.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#263

Post by ianamartin » Mon, Jan 04, 2016, 11:00 AM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #58

pcote wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Sometimes, things that have concrete negative impacts can BENEFIT organizations. That's a very good point too. If you wander, unaware, into a quest to change something with negative externalities on workers or the public at large but with a positive effect on the business, you'll find yourself suddenly in a minefield of opposition with a target painted on your back and no idea who you've just made enemies of. Tread…

If you are able to positively identify negative externalities that produce benefits for your company--benefits your company depends on--you shouldn't tread carefully. You should quit your job.

Is there no sense of ethics in our profession?

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#264

Post by karlkatzke » Mon, Jan 04, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

theGimp wrote: post #243

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.

Why not? I worked there, it's publicly verifiable, and it's pertinent to the discussion since we're discussing it on YCombinator's forum.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#265

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 04, 2016, 8:45 PM UTC

pklausler wrote: post #114

"There’s the office where I asked one day about the fact that I almost never saw two particular people in the same room together. I was told that they had a feud going back a decade, and that things had actually improved – for years, they literally couldn’t be in the same room because one of the two would get too angry and do something regrettable, but things had now cooled to the point where the two could, occasiona…

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#266

Post by mod » Mon, Jan 04, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #239

mod wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if one build fails and you run it again and it passes, what do you do? I run it a third time, to start.

What do you do differently based on the outcome of that? The only scenario I can think of where that makes sense as a first step is if you're happy to ignore a 1-out-of-3 failure but feel the need to investigate a 2-out-of-3, which seems like an odd position to take.

I just think it's the best diagnostic step to take first.

If it fails again, perhaps you've got a timing issue, or something that's switching back and forth.

Of course you're not happy to ignore the failure.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#267

Post by cptskippy » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

kps wrote: post #84

cptskippy wrote: post #31

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.

Browser defaults have a legacy and they're not easy to change without disruption. Just because they're less than ideal isn't an valid excuse to neglect your content presentation.

The author seems to have concerns for UX because his page isn't just HTML. He put some CSS on the nav header, used some HTML5 semantic elements, some Aria roles, and added a viewport header element for mobile scaling. Sadly his concerns were passing as 1/3 of his CSS is rendered moot, and his desire for a semantic page was abandoned quickly after implementing his navigation and footer.

His page's UX is improved dramatically by adding 2 simple CSS rules (margin, max-width). If those rules add too many bytes to the page he could convert his navigation divs to a proper unorder list and get some bytes back and make his page more semantic to boot.

His page is just a drive by attempt at standards and it's lazy.