Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Be Kind

briangilham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 458 posts

Re: Be Kind

#241

Post by heymijo »

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #79
77pt77 wrote: post #71

Except in real life people sometimes make malicious "mistakes" deliberately and when caught and called out on them either completely dismiss them or even gloat. This reads almost like a fairy tale.

In my experience very few serious mistakes are deliberate and there is a huge gain to find a way to not make the same mistake again. Which include avoiding blame, but rather go looking for the root cause. People who can handle serious mistakes in others are some of the best partners you can have in your efforts. IMHO they aren't fairy tales.

There's a story that I love about Pixar, a Black Swan event, and Toy Story 2 [0]. The gist was, the movie's files were accidentally deleted while still in production, and the backup was corrupted.

Instead of blasting people for mistakes they set about fixing the immediate problem, and then instead of demanding "accountability" from those responsible, they set about fixing the root cause.

A few excerpts from the linked article:

"Aside from the fact that there was immediate chatter about who might have made such a dumb move, the discussion quickly moved right on to how to fix the problem."

"Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time."

[0] http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-...

Re: Be Kind

#242

Post by [deleted] »

southphillyman wrote: post #39
crush_xc wrote: post #17

This was literally the biggest issue for when I started at my first job. We had a team member who was terribly condescending and talked down to everyone but especially me. You could tell that he hated the fact that he was on a team with a junior developer and took every chance he had to made sure I knew I wasn't as good as him. It makes a terrifying environment to ask questions because who knows what kind of response…

Maybe I have just had bad experiences but a lot of developers do this thing where they answer a question with a snarky question. Sometimes it's annoying to be asked basic questions but behaving in a condescending way lends to people not asking questions at all and not communicating issues. It doesn't matter if the person is Jr. or Sr. I've seen good capable Sr. developers miss stories because they would rather be sil…

[deleted]

Re: Be Kind

#243

Post by SadWebDeveloper »

> Jr Dev

> Access to production

> With clients that need the service running 24/7

Oh boy... is he used to work on facebook? when i was a jr dev, i didn't have access to production everything went to source control and then tested by my project technical leader and qa. This ensure that i won't do this things since my changes getting reviewed and tested plus we have reproducible builds that anyone can verify and continue working.

Case in point: No JR Dev ever need access to production ever, period.

Re: Be Kind

#244

Post by vmarsy »

gbog wrote: post #234
wyago wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're probably not implying regression to the mean is causational, but that was my initial reading so I want to clarify for those who may not be familiar with the concept. Regression to the mean is simply that any given datapoint is most likely to be the mean, or close to it. This means that any exceptional data point,up or down, can be expected to be followed up by the mean. The example of this being misinte…

The pilot performance example is in Thinking Fast and Slow, I think.

I've read that story in "How to win friends and influence people"

https://www.google.com/#&q=%22how+to+win+friends+and+influen...

Re: Be Kind

#245

Post by sparrish »

phn wrote: post #231
sparrish wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And my own darn fault for using platform Y from team X that would release a security update on a Friday. Yes, fix it. But if this isn't a one-off, get off of platform Y.

Are you suggesting delaying security updates because it's Friday? I mean, you can update only on Monday if you so wish, you're unprotected either way.

If platform Y regularly releases security updates on Friday, that's poor management by X and I would reconsider using platform Y. 0-day issues of high severity should be the exception.

Re: Be Kind

#246

Post by drawkbox »

The mistake was launching something on a Friday before vacation. Wed or Thursday would solve this. Launching on Mondays or Fridays, not a good idea.

So that is another lesson learned in addition to being cool when someone messes up once in a while. In ego driven teams sometimes it turns into the blame game and throwing under the bus, that is not kind.

Re: Be Kind

#247

Post by SadWebDeveloper »

Personally i prefer the type of mentor/boss that comes and says things straight, surgarcoating everything isn't good once you realize that everyone could think you are stupid or well starting to find your replacement.

Re: Be Kind

#248

Post by MrMullen »

justin_oaks wrote: post #108
hluska wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but you have no defense. Laughing at a junior developer'a code is completely inexcusable. Simple fact is, if you worked for me, I would have fired you for that. Junior devs are supposed to do bad things - that's why they aren't senior devs.

Firing for laughing? Did you forget the point of the article? Be kind. Don't hand out harsh punishments for mistakes. Teach instead. (Only fire if the person is immune to teaching.)

Let me relay a story about people who laugh at and mock other people's work.

My wife used to work as a copy editor at a major newspaper and worked with one of those "laugh at and make rude comments about other people's work" kind of people. The copy editing checks had to be checked by another copy editor before it was allowed to be forwarded to the layout team for placement in the news paper. How the story checkin and checkout system worked was that your submitted checks were anonymous to other team members. So, there was this one guy on copy editing team who openly mocked and call other people's work "stupid" and "idiotic". He could never say the person's name that he was talking about, but since every copy editor was in the same room, you knew he might be talking about your work. Everyone hated the guy and everyone complained about the guy. My wife would say how much everyone just hated working with the guy and he was just one of those people that made the job unpleasant.

Then layoffs came around (Newspaper in the Internet Age). When this guy was laid off, champagne bottle were opened up and people celebrated. You know when someone is bad when there is a "sorry to see you go" bar get together and they are not invited. A strange thing happened though, productivity went up because people felt better about submitting their work for final approval. Less copy editor mistakes, less stress, more learning, more openness and more engaging with other team members happend. Barriers between teams fell and even with layoffs, people felt better.

It turns out that the person who mocks other people's work, make for a crappy work environment. You can be tolerant of failures on technical levels, but failure in personal level should not be tolerated. Be pleasant to work with, or should you should be fired.

Re: Be Kind

#249

Post by qb45 »

cableshaft wrote: post #150
7Z7 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, which suggests that coders from Amazon generally have rubbish code, excusing the laughter.

No, it means he expected that particular person's code quality to be better than that, because he lasted at a 'Big Four' company for three years and thus should have decent coding chops, but apparently didn't, thus the incongruence made him laugh. It doesn't mean all Amazon coders are shit.

The original wording is ambiguous. I too read it as if OP had some issues with people coming from there.

Re: Be Kind

#250

Post by MrMullen »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #188
kenrikm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at someone's code is like laughing at someone's painting or their novel or really any other creative endeavor. It's not ok period.

If someone's work is poor enough that a reasonable person might laugh at it, then there's nothing wrong with that. Hence the phrase "laugh at our mistakes". It doesn't mean you are a bad coder/painter, it just means you made mistakes that were a little funny and can learn from them like anyone else.

We "laugh at our mistakes" not "laugh at other people while they are making the mistake".
Post reply on HN