341–350 of 458 posts
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Oh his behalf, I apologize. I literally started laughing at a junior's code once but in my defense, he had spent 3 years at Amazon.
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.
There is a dash-cam filming the inside cockpit of a plane when the pilot abruptly finds himself in one of those "death spirals" or "flat spins".
The pilot doesn't say a word.
He immediately reverts to his training, rights the plane, glides it towards the ground, and only grunts a bit when he crash-lands.
I found that absolutely amazing. To have that level of poise when you are literally facing death is unbelievable.
It is very similar to the simple advice given in the linked blog post.
Staying calm in difficult situations is the most efficient course of action.
Stressing out, raising your voice, yelling about things, or blaming others isn't going to do a damned thing when your plane is literally spinning out of control and going to kill you in a few minutes.
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>But what if they're a hugely over-confident asshole? Then they have absolutely no business working on a team effort. They never should have been hired in the first place.
And yet here they are. With respect, this doesn't tell us what to do if we run into a hugely over-confident asshole.
Fire them, if you can. Before they poison your entire talent pool with negativity.
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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.
Laughing in this situation is merely inappropriate. Firing someone for being inappropriate once or twice is incredibly toxic behaviour.
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>But what if they're a hugely over-confident asshole? Then they have absolutely no business working on a team effort. They never should have been hired in the first place.
I don't agree. I've seen some very junior people change their attitudes rapidly (for the better) when working on a team; if we wrote them off immediately we'd lose out on a lot of promising people. I was also one of those developers and have since changed my ways :)
Absolutely however I do agree with you. If a young developer doesn't integrate into a team role immediately, that's no reason to not hire him.
A lot of great developers are so great because they've spent years alone with their computers just cranking out code. So the best ones won't have the greatest social skills.
But if the kid's still having trouble integrating into their team role after their 6 month probationary period, for example, I personally wouldn't vouch for them any longer.
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.
You are obviously free to decide to detach the threads that you see fit, but not detaching at the parent level strikes me as incomprehensible and discretionary.
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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.
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…
Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :(
Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising.
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This is a good point--I remember even the online game "Runescape" had a warning that would pop up if you tried to sell an item worth X for a very low price. It would seem to me (somebody who knows squat about stock trading) that a warning screen would be much more beneficial for stock trading software than it is for an online video game.
You'd think that, but then what happens is users get used to the warnings coming up and consciously/unconsciously adjust to click by it without reading . I'd imagine in the case of the stock trader, where quick reaction is valued, he'd have quickly entered whatever key combo is necessary to dismiss it the warning and made the same mistake.