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Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

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Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#51

Post by webscalist »

joshaidan wrote: post #36

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issue…

No, each microservice does one thing.

Yes, they could have provided an orchestrating microservice.

But they did a good job. Tech issues microservice should not have knowledge of other departments.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#52

Post by cmurf »

smokeyj wrote: post #35
smokeyj wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how I feel about our democratic process. The process is you pick one of two parties. Then you get into a face bloodying fight with the other party. Nothing gets done, then you pat yourself on the back for doing your part. When you come to the realization that nothing has been accomplished, you blame those who didn't participate in the brawl. Suggesting that people work ON the process rather than IN the proces…

This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're imp…

There is an oligopoly in politics called Democrats and Republicans, and they've created, by law, many barriers to entry for any competing parties, let alone casting aside either party.

Disruption in this vast market is difficult. Millenials and Xers will have to team up and work cooperatively. The baby boomers have gotten Democrats and Republicans to pander to them, there is no possible way those parties go away if baby boomers have any say about it.

As to why there are two parties, it's central to how the government is configured. No runoffs, range or preference voting, means that you get punished when voting for fringe candidates, because there's a very good chance the ideological opposite will win as a result of choosing a 3rd party candidate. Majoritarian democracies like the U.K. parliamentary system tend to have only two big parties, where consensual democracies like Switzerland and Germany have many parties represented in their legislatures. The U.S. is a hybrid, but the voting mechanism results in pretty much a two party system.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#53

Post by criley2 »

_gi12 wrote: post #22
mstank wrote: post #2

"A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp." Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlin…

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the…

I'm dealing with a similar problem, except on 4 week sprints. It's not management, who doesn't care, it's the team itself which continues to be FIXATED on a burn down chart, to the extent that they massage story points, avoid doing work late in sprints, and are way too concerned with burndown in general.

Shipping valuable features without regressions is my metric of success. Not y=mx+b applied to story points.

Burn down charts are misused far too much to be considered generally valuable.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#54

Post by fbonetti »

Diederich wrote: post #33
_gi12 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the…

This was happening at a startup ? How common is this kind of process slavery in startups?

Yes, it was a VC-funded, early-stage startup.

On top of the large amount of process and the one week sprints, we also four different dev teams each working on their own microservice app which was tightly coupled to the other apps in the company. Every team had to deploy at the same time, and if one app went down, the other apps went down with it. The company's platform was essentially an ecommerce site that could have been one medium sized monolith, maintained by a single team of 5 or 6 developers, but instead we had 20+ developers, several dev managers, a scrum master, and a large QA automation team. I guess you could call it premature optimization.

There were also plenty of issues on the business side that prevented the company from truly succeeding. The place was a bit of a clusterfuck but it was an excellent learning experience.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#55

Post by hkmurakami »

rconti wrote: post #46
joshaidan wrote: post #36

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issue…

One of my most memorable customer service examples was memorable merely because it didn't go poorly. The vibrate function on my Ericsson T39 cell phone failed. I was dreading calling support, because I knew they'd tell me to piss off. It was a grey-market phone. I bought it on eBay unlocked, shipped to my home in the US. I wasn't the first owner, for that reason. It came with a UK charger. They didn't even sell the p…

iirc Nintendo has many stories like this from the 90's.

Hope their culture is still in tact after these years of mediocre to bad fiscal results.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#56

Post by positivejam »

TheGRS wrote: post #25
dpark wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” - Bezos > We sought volunteers and then followed our involuntary denial of boarding process - Munoz Ouch

Yea, I'm not going to share which airline or which branch (other than to say it wasn't United or Chicago), but I have a relative who works at a pretty high position in one of them and they were, to my great surprise, in defense of United and the police in that episode earlier this week. Statements like "airlines bump people all the time", "they can't offer anymore than what they did, its a set rule", and "if they jus…

Re: the notion that "airlines bump people all the time", there are those arguing that while it is indeed lawful and routine for airlines to bump passengers due to overbooking, this was not a case of overbooking, and once a passenger has taken their seat they have very different rights than when they are still waiting to board the plane. I am by no means an expert, but I found this article (posted on HN yesterday) to be illuminating: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/04/united-passenger-remo...

Basically, this wasn't just poor customer service, it was a violation of rules.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#57

Post by smokeyj »

dangero wrote: post #40
smokeyj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're imp…

Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.

Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law.

I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technology issues, and Sal Khan to represent me on education.

Government is just an organization, and an organization is a network. We should be using computer science terms to describe how we want this network to operate in terms of resolution, latency, redundancy, centralization/decentralization, upgrade protocls, failovers, and so on.

What I'm trying to say is.. Let's purge the politicians and put the people in charge.

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#58

Post by nitrogen »

dangero wrote: post #40
smokeyj wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment seems to be well received based on the points. I think about this often and it drives me nuts that the two party system is the best we have. It's like we're trying to optimize an operating system at every level EXCEPT THE KERNEL. Suggesting that you don't buy into the two party system is met with skepticism, as if you're a closet supporter of one party. Or worse, that by not supporting a party you're imp…

Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.

Seems approval voting would be easy and predictable based on http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Re: Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter

#59

Post by dangero »

smokeyj wrote: post #57
dangero wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without runoff elections its always going to veer towards a two party system. It would work if we did two votes: vote first for who you want, then second vote for the best choice from top two.

Which leads to the next question. Why are we voting for a human at all? If members of an organization want a resolution passed anyone should be able to propose it - and if the magic threshold is met - then whala - the resolution is law. I want to be able to vote everyday. I want to be able to pick who I want to represent my vote - and change it at will. I want to be able to pick Bill Gates to represent me on technolo…

I agree the replacement for current democracy is more technology based with provable transparency. Bitcoin's decentralized ledger breathes a lot of life into this concept.
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