One of the easiest strategies to protect your reputation in life and business is to never venture to say yes (because if it fails you are on the hook), and to let your discussion always revolve around an idea's failings, never its strengths. It gives an appearance of expertise and command, but risks little, and thus often leads to promotion. But I personally find it poisonous to the enterprise's progress: Even the best plans have weaknesses.
You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
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Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#12Isn't no swap in prod fairly standard? Kubernetes pre-flight checks check it, for example.
If enabling swap 'fixes' it, isn't the proper fix to provision more memory?
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#13I'm coming to the conclusion that many technical problems are actually morale problems. This especially goes for flamebait, where some people come down heavily on one side of the argument or another.
If you don't care, it's much easier to default to someone else's directive, or complain about a toolset you haven't bothered to learn.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#14Obviously such a person can exist but my Spidey senses always tingle when I’m reading about what an asshole someone else is.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#15I think of most in-house corporate lawyers as playing the role of "no men". There job is to highlight risks and stop things from happening. It's a rare lawyer who understands business goals and can balance them against risks.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#16I'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…
Swap causes not disk decay but performance decay; the system gets unamanageably slow and would have been better off with a clean crash and failover.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#17I'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"?
Happened at my company, where we had some policy in response to an incident, put into place by a couple of senior leaders... the policy was overly broad, but kinda made sense for the problem.
After a while, those two leaders left, and we started seeing issues that the policy was causing. However, people still stuck to the policy. When I would argue that the policy wasn't really accomplishing what it was originally intended to do anymore, I was repeatedly told it didn't matter, it was the policy. There was no one to even argue against anymore, because they were gone, but the policy remained.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#18I'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…
This reminds me of a previous company that paid consulting fees to have their Postgres configuration tuned. When the hardware was upgraded nobody knew to review the memory settings. After a series of production outages we realized that the new Postgres servers were utilizing 16 GB of RAM when we had 128 GB available.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#19I don’t get it.
1 - there is a Mr.No guy but, the author only knows him by reputation
2 - there is a technical problem that seems to revolve around memory
3 - the author has an idea of a solution, she actually tries as people don’t believe her
4 - her solution works, but she is told the “No” guy said “no swap” once a long time ago
Her reaction: “Did I care what he supposedly said? No.”
Why doesn’t she go talk to him ? The “No” guy could have had another solution than raising swap. He could have recognized being wrong, allow swap and learn from it. He could continue say “No” but now the author has an actual experience of it, and not just hearsay and reputation.
It seems like nobody communicates correctly in that company, the author included, and it must hurt in so many places.
Edit: fixed author’s gender, thanks
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#20Trust but verify. I'd bet if the author went to the original source, the "no man" himself, they may find that there is actually no such policy! Just a mishearing of a conversation parroted by "wrong people".