>He was fired from Home Depot for building a fort once. It's a fun story.
dude... you're not a 16 year old girl man... this is not cute at all.
Be Kind
221–230 of 458 posts
Re: Be Kind
#222We're an industry filled with people who have social disorders. Some people are just angry little people. Misspell something in a config file and they just ... go ... ballistic... It's not enough to just try and tell these people to be nice. They don't know HOW to be nice. Their brain isn't wired to be nice. Edit: spelling.
I hate to be this guy... but 'ballistic' has two l's.
Re: Be Kind
#223>He was fired from Home Depot for building a fort once. It's a fun story.
dude... you're not a 16 year old girl... don't try to be cute.
Re: Be Kind
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two schools of thought, especially in stock trading. 1) Reversion to the mean. This is what the above person believes and that this likely won't happen again. 2) Indication of a trend. The pilot is actually incompetent, and this will happen more frequently with this pilot than an average pilot.
Isn't regression to the mean a phenomenon of random variables? Humans aren't perfect improvement machines, but they surely beat a random variable?!
Correct. I think reversion to the mean is a non-sequitur here.
Neither the GP's quote, nor the OP, are making the statement "I understand that this mistake was an outlier, you'll probably never make this mistake again if you remain unchanged".
The claim being made is that acknowledging the mistake and learning from it can dramatically reduce the base probability of such mistakes happening again.
Re: Be Kind
#225I have the similar problem with code reviews. It is really hard to not sound harsh when giving a code review, especially in ones from junior developers where a whole laundry list of fixes comes out.
It is hard, particularly when management has put someone in a position they don't have the training for. In a junior developer that's understandable, but still painful when you have deadlines. Luckily, most developers are willing to learn and pretty good at seeing the patterns[1] of things done by the team.
To me, the biggest thing is don't lie to save feelings. You need to tell the truth or they will feel a whole lot worse later. Loosen yourself up. Don't go into that ridged pose. Talk evenly, and if you can manage it act in a jovial mood as you walk in. For the love of all you hold holy, know what they did code-wise, and take some damn notes before hand. Winging it will be the death of their trust. Teachers you don't trust aren't going to teach you anything.
I had a job where I was the C code reviewer, but was not allowed to program in C[2]. One developer, a fairly senior one, wrote some of the worst code I've ever seen. My code review was basically C 101 and it really was a tough chore to keep myself following good body language and words while still indicating the code needed a lot of changes to be acceptable. I really do blame the employer for setting the developer up to fail (no C training, just read a book and wing it). I did it ok, but I really wish I had a mentor of some sort in the room to give me a critique of my critique.
1) I really don't mean design patterns, more like the general pattern of code with that project / workplace.
2) Well, obviously I couldn't write C code since there would be no one to code review mine. Not obvious? Wasn't to me either to tell the truth. I got to spend my days programming in a reporting language and AWK. I only lasted 9 months (my 3 seasons in heck).
Re: Be Kind
#226Re: Be Kind
#227Earlier 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 sound like the one who'd have called BG back from his camping trip to fix up his code - a 3 hours drive and a ruined weekend for him, instead of maybe a 5 minute rollback to the latest stable version for you. So with your mindset, it's no wonder people react to you the way you describe it. But believe it or not - most probably you are the problem, not them.
Talk about unsupported assumptions.
I can play that game too!
Maybe the most likely explanation is that you are a sociopath and resent having your nature so clearly exposed.
Of course I have no way of knowing this and it's totally unsupported by fact, kind of like your comment.
Re: Be Kind
#228We're an industry filled with people who have social disorders. Some people are just angry little people. Misspell something in a config file and they just ... go ... ballistic... It's not enough to just try and tell these people to be nice. They don't know HOW to be nice. Their brain isn't wired to be nice. Edit: spelling.
I hate to be this guy... but 'ballistic' has two l's.
Correct, and thanks.
Re: Be Kind
#229Nice 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…
Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…
Reminds me of an old VP of mine who came thundering out of his office, absolutely livid, shouting, "What idiot gave me permissions to delete the source backups???"