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Be Kind

briangilham.com

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Re: Be Kind

#261

Post by patio11 »

endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. 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.”

There is a perhaps apocryphal story about the time when Mizuho Securities lost ~$225 million by attempting to sell 610k shares at 1 yen instead of 1 share at 610k yen. When asked whether he intended to fire the person who physically keyed in the order, the relevant department head stated that he did not intend to waste the firm's substantial investment in teaching them to act with due deliberation.

Re: Be Kind

#262

Post by sctb »

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.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707881 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Be Kind

#263

Post by sctb »

coldtea wrote: post #91

> 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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707881 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Be Kind

#264

Post by enraged_camel »

rimantas wrote: post #106
enraged_camel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laughing at a junior's work when you are their mentor is a firable offense in my eyes.

People ready to fire someone for laughing should not be allowed to work with other human beings at all, in my opinion. What's going on with this ready to be offended for wind blowing the wrong way culture and the fragile egos?

It's not just about laughing. It's about laughing at someone's work in a derogatory manner. I hope you can tell the difference and understand the extremely negative impact the latter can have on culture.

Re: Be Kind

#265

Post by brazzledazzle »

slgeorge wrote: post #257
nathas wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. If you have something that is of significant value to the company, you need to hedge your risk. Automation is a particular hedge. People fail, and while processes do too, they often fail less. Would you be comfortable moving something fragile by hand that is worth a lot of money? Maybe. Would you prefer if the fragile item being moved was done with an automated process that was shown to best protect fragi…

I think you've hit the nail on the head at the end with "right tone at the right time" - the right time is almost certainly not when one has screwed up.

Or if you think it can and should be fixed at that institutional level tell them what you've learned to do better on a personal level and then volunteer to help lead the effort to create the automation/systems to prevent anyone else from making the same mistake in the future.

Re: Be Kind

#266

Post by JohannesH »

Also as a senior developer you carry some of the responsibility for the junior's ability to make that mistake. You probably set up and maintained the development environment where such an error could slip through into production.

So in case of a critical error/melt-down you should first of all blame yourself and think about why you set up a process and an environment that let this happen in the first place.

Think about what went wrong and how you can prevent it from happening again. When I started at my current place of work, they had a horrible manual deployment process that was the cause of 99% of all problems they experienced. Rarely critical problems, but still annoying and unprofessional. So we implemented automated build, test and deployment process that got rid of almost all of these problems.

Now, whenever something bad happens, we realize it is a problem with the process (not the individual) and correct/improve it as needed.

Re: Be Kind

#268

Post by JoshTriplett »

patio11 wrote: post #261
endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. 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.”

There is a perhaps apocryphal story about the time when Mizuho Securities lost ~$225 million by attempting to sell 610k shares at 1 yen instead of 1 share at 610k yen. When asked whether he intended to fire the person who physically keyed in the order, the relevant department head stated that he did not intend to waste the firm's substantial investment in teaching them to act with due deliberation.

I've seen several versions of that story, often with the quote "Why would we fire you? We just spent $X million educating you." Probably some combination of truth and exaggeration, but it makes for a memorable story regardless.

Re: Be Kind

#269

Post by SatvikBeri »

herge wrote: post #4

I 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.

This is one of the main reasons I prefer pairing w/junior developers over code reviews. Giving lots of small pieces of feedback feels a lot less harsh than a monolithic dump of everything that's wrong.

Re: Be Kind

#270

Post by Normal_gaussian »

gavman wrote: post #78

This was so nice to read. I think back to my very first coding internship after my freshman year of college when I messed up big time. I made a bad mistake that ended up forcing my supervisor to put down everything he was working on for a full afternoon and do an emergency fix. I so vividly remember sitting down in his office, trying to just calm down and keep it together. He never got upset or annoyed (at least he n…

Mistakes happen. I can deal with that.

People lying about their progress however, that is hard to deal with.

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