Thanks a lot for sharing this. I've been in 3 different companies now where I learned a lot but the biggest reason I left my first job was because I was afraid to ask questions because my boss did not know how to respond to a simple question without being snarky or rude.
I learned a lot from that job but I knew that I wanted to be in a better environment and I am thankful that I made that decision. Working in an environment where everyone is encouraged after making mistakes and learn from it is where I want to work for.
Be Kind
191–200 of 458 posts
Re: Be Kind
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
And becoming passive implies the message that you're a pushover to whom anything can be done because there will never be nefarious consequences. To those people the mindset is: If I do X I might gain something (or feels good) and no mater what I'll never suffer any retaliation for it. Why shouldn't I do it?
I think perhaps your mindset, and possibly your situation, might be improved if you assumed less about other people's thought process and motivation, or at least if you didn't assume you were correct. It's very easy to come up with ideas about what someone is thinking and why, it's much, much harder to be correct about that. By assuming you know why people are doing things, you've already biased yourself against futu…
I've had many of these people explicitly state that this is their state of mind after they realize they can't get their way.
They'll do it in private so that their social standing doesn't suffer but they are very explicit about it.
Not a lot of room left for assumptions after this.
Downvote away.
Re: Be Kind
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, he'd have to sooner or later. Better start learning as soon as possible :)
Nobody should be deploying to production on Friday... Nobody.
Reminds me when my boss got pissed at me because we were discussing moving all deployments to production after 5pm and I replied something along the line "I'm not going to be on the hook after hours to fix problems other people caused".
Re: Be Kind
#194> That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it. ...he said, before his final fatal flight. Apparently some people DO do the same mistake twice. ([Edit] to avoid confusion: My addition is about giving a different twist to the story, to show that it's not a given that people who made a mistake will not be prone to repeat it. Some peop…
Maybe tell a true story that helps your point, rather than a blatantly fictitious one. I could tell a story about purple moon dragons, but it wouldn't "show" anything.
Sure it could.
Re: Be Kind
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody should be deploying to production on Friday... Nobody.
[Client, Friday 4PM]"Hello, client here. I know it's Friday 4pm but we messed up and did X. Could you deploy Y fix, thanks!" [Client, Friday 4PM] "We are having a big sale this weekend we told nobody about. Could you quickly deploy a fix where all the product's prices are red and bold? That shouldn't take you long, right?" [Project manager, Friday 4:45PM] "Hey team, X just released an important security fix for Y pla…
In my opinion, only the last one may be justified.
Re: Be Kind
#196Junior developers who make a mistake? Cut them some slack and teach them. Senior developers who make the same mistakes over and over and never learn? I've kindly pointed out the mistake and invited them to avoid it in future. After a few more failures, I sometimes talk to them sternly, but the sad thing is that they won't learn from either kindness or harshness. I'm not in a position to fire them. Does anyone have an…
Talk to your manager. That is their job to make sure they are doing what they're supposed to in a more formal setting if informal coaching does not work.
Re: Be Kind
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
And becoming passive implies the message that you're a pushover to whom anything can be done because there will never be nefarious consequences. To those people the mindset is: If I do X I might gain something (or feels good) and no mater what I'll never suffer any retaliation for it. Why shouldn't I do it?
You're talking about sociopaths. Who are estimated to make up 4% of the population. So you should be prepared to deal with them and cut them off as needed, but you shouldn't base your average strategy on assuming everyone you deal with is one.
No. I'm taking about usual human behavior.
Those figures of 4% are fairytales, not unlike what most psychologists said before knowing the outcomes of the Milgram experiment.
Almost no one believed that the vast majority of subjects would take the experiment to its end.
Re: Be Kind
#198Nice little read. There is that little answer in the back of my head of: "It is a good question why I caused this problem. It is weird to think there is a competent company that has been around for so many years, yet they have no procedures in place to stop this from happening. You would think that any changes that could cause downtime on a clients website would go through an automatic test suite and only after passi…
I feel where you're coming from, but in reality it's not like any test suite can guarantee to prevent downtime caused by bad deploys. All it takes is a little networking related bug, something that differs ever so slightly between environments, whatever, and your site could be down.
I agree with the other replies that while you may be the 'technically right dev' kind of person, it still comes of as being a dick and you will likely not get a positive response from something like this, especially if you caused it.
What makes it more reasonable to say it's the company's responsibility to protect you from fucking up the site instead of you just being a good developer, and not fucking up the site?
Re: Be Kind
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because missing three days of velocity will definitely cause your growth hacking to fall off the hockey stick and reduce the tempo of your disruption of unique hackathons for people with a left little toe deficiency?
Nothing of that. The reason has nothing to do with "startup culture", head in the clouds buzzword crap, quite the opposite. The changes are pushed and working in staging, the tests are passing, Q&A is done. Why hold off? So that you get your Good Practices™ badge? I'd say it's better that you don't have to deal with last week's work on a Monday if at all possible. I think being down to earth, and keeping your good ju…
If it's a startup the more likely scenario is no QA employees and minimal test coverage.
Re: Be Kind
#200This is underrated for managers and leaders trying to develop young talent. The takeaways:
- With a system outage, don't lose your cool. Rationality is what's needed at the time.
- Elevating "perfection" at the expense of potential breakage will ensure nothing ever moves forward and your team doesn't grow.
Instead, this manager leaves his engineer with thoughts about how to avoid that problem in the future. Always remember -- an outage is eventually fixed, but a damaged relationship continues forward.