You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
rachelbythebay.com
You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
1–10 of 151 posts
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#2I've heard the "kernel extension guy" story at my last job; it's fairly well-known there although it wasn't a "completely obvious change", it was heavily obfuscated and possibly done over several PRs in order to sneak it in. Hadn't heard any subsequent stories though, including the swap story of the rest of the article.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#3I've found there's something even worse: Policies that aren't actually attached to any known person.
At least with the swap example, there was someone you could talk to, or ask your manager to talk to. But what if it was just an Onion in the Varnish and nobody remembered who said no swap in prod, it was just "That's the [company name] Way"?
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#4Wow, I had multiple very similar experiences with the same person she's talking about.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#5The funny thing is we're all making trade-offs at various times. So there will be people who will point at someone else and say "He's a no-man" and at other points they will be the "no-man". I remember saying "no" a lot at some points of my life, and I think it was because I hadn't yet learned to say "the cost of that is this and in my opinion it isn't worth it" but there are still times I am speaking to people where they are unable to truly grok the cost given my current skill of explaining and then it probably looks like I'm a no-man.
Besides, come on, who even has dogmatic rules like "No Swap In Production". That's just short-hand for a concept. When it's in dispute you have to trace the reasoning again. There's no alternative. I cannot imagine doing something only because someone said so. I certainly recall a time when someone said "Person X isn't going to like this" and saying "Well, then, person X is going to have to find another way to solve your problem". I certainly hope that if I'm person X in someone else's story, they take the same approach.
And if you have to trace the reasoning more than once, it's probably worth writing down your argument. Not as a big RFC-style thing necessarily, but even just a Slack thread you can point to.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#6I'll take a stab at explaining what happened here:
"No swap in production" probably stemmed from someone who worked on the servers, and that person discovered they were swapping too much, which would eventually lead to hard drive decay. And, maybe for budget reasons or whatever, they decided to make it a policy to disable swap, rather than increase RAM or change the underlying software that caused the servers to use too much RAM.
And now, later, on different servers with different software and different specs, the policy still exists, because nobody really paid much attention to why it was created in the first place.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#7There are any number of these type of people at any large organization, and I often flip flop on their usefulness.
Usually, they are in the form of protectors of the "process". This wasn't vetted by so and so, or didn't go through the proper channels, or doesn't use the right technology. And 51/100 times, they may be right - they keep unnecessary scope creep, bad ideas, technical debt, overhead out of the process. Literally the only reason people bother following a process is because of them.
But at the same time they are a huge drain on time and resources, and can enable bad or inefficient processes by manually keeping things in line. They add nothing to innovation - and it's a huge bummer to work with/around them.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#8I definitely felt this decades ago when I started in the industry.
It's 2019 now though. only 8 years later, but a lot of things changed.
The industry is growing fast, faster than knowledge can be shared even with all the power of the internet. It's very bottom up, with newer engineers severely outnumbering those that have been around. People are making fat salaries and companies are catering to their whims. They/we're more spoiled than they've ever been. People go to work hoping they'll be find a reason today to try the latest pattern they saw on Twitter or try the trendy new tech or library their friend just talked about.
If you don't have people saying no, it quickly (very quickly) get out of control. As organizations grow, you need to start saying no. A lot. Else within 0.2 seconds of the new intern joining or the new grad coming in, or the lateral hire who was the king of their 5 people startup will be pushing some stuff that isn't mature enough or doesn't follow established patterns. More often, they'll be reintroducing something problematic that you just finished getting rid of 6 months ago.
It sucks. Sure, there are some power hungry people who get off on power trip by being gate keepers. But overall, it's just people desperately trying to keep things in one piece and the company going, and that means making hard decisions and enforcing them. It just doesn't feel good to say no, arguing all day with people who have way more energy than you do, but it has to be done.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#9This doesn't have much to do with saying "no" and everything to do with not understanding the fundamentals of a policy. If they guy who said "no swap" had a reason, then you could have discussed and potentially changed the policy.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#10The funny thing is we're all making trade-offs at various times. So there will be people who will point at someone else and say "He's a no-man" and at other points they will be the "no-man". I remember saying "no" a lot at some points of my life, and I think it was because I hadn't yet learned to say "the cost of that is this and in my opinion it isn't worth it" but there are still times I am speaking to people where…
Have Slack threads risen to the level of documentation now?