Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 151 posts

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#41

Post by tabtab »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #11

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 be…

It's better to list the risks in a matter-of-fact way rather than imply a project is summarily a bad idea. If you act like Chicken Little on everything, then your next complaint will have no credibility, like in the boy-calling-wolf story.

But there are times, such over ADA/accessibility and data security issues where I am somewhat insistent, but people ignore me. They seem to value a "cute" UI over these. I'm doing the right thing but get rebuffed. We are not in the cute-UI business. Our domain is not a toy or fashion store. We've been sued for ADA issues in the past, and our competitor has had data breaches, so they are relatively likely risks. It's frustrating to be dismissed the way I am.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#42

Post by ryandrake »

legitster wrote: post #7

There 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. Li…

As one of the dreaded "process enforcers" at my company, it's a tough line to walk. Any organization with more than a handful of people needs some written and agreed upon process or it's just chaos. But you can't just blindly follow a process for its own sake. You need to be able to articulate why we follow it with examples from the past of what happens without it. And, you need to be willing to constantly look for ways to improve it. Anything I can do to automate processes or simplify them makes the developers happier and more productive and me less of the bad guy. An inefficient process where people are always waiting on something to happen is demotivating to everyone.

Most process is scar tissue from something that went wrong in the past. We have mandatory code reviews because when we didn't we let a severe security bug get deployed to production. We have legal review all changes to the terms of service so we don't get successfully sued over it again. We have a schedule with code freeze N weeks before release because when we didn't we could never release anything because...just...one...more...change.

I was hired at a small company once without any process for anything. No release process or schedule. No bug tracker. No testing plan. No code reviews. Nobody used source control. Builds from different workstations produced wildly different binaries. It was a total madhouse and it was amazing that anything got done at all. The CEO simply thought the engineers just weren't competent enough, but they were--it was just a circus because nobody stepped up to formalize anything. Once we got a bug tracker and SVN set up, things turned around pretty quickly.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#43

Post by hrktb »

scarejunba wrote: post #40
vxNsr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you caught like half the male pronouns, there are still a bunch left, it actually makes it more confusing.

It makes it sort of like the sci-fi book Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. You have no idea what the gender of the protagonist is. Perhaps future gender-neutral speech will sound like this instead of choosing a third pronoun.

It’s crazier in languages where adjectives take genders as well. Japanese is blessed in this regard.

(I fixed the remaining bits)

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#44

Post by ndarwincorn »

hrktb wrote: post #19

I 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…

> It seems like nobody communicates correctly in that company, the author included, and it must hurt in so many places.

Depending on what you think of Google (or maybe Rackspace, but I think Google's more likely the source of that post), you might be surprised at what company you're talking about.

I think you're spot on but am curious if you'd write that if you knew where they worked.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#45

Post by SubiculumCode »

dijit wrote: post #38
SubiculumCode wrote: post #11

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 be…

Er. This is awful advice. You’re also on the hook for impeding the organisation. I’m a “no” guy. My boss is a pure yes man. I don’t say no to impede progress. I say no to avoid overworking my team which would reduce the quality of our work. I say no, because it changes the scope of work in progress, and that requires sufficient justification because it means either throwing work away (which is both demoralising and w…

What you say is true, which makes the topic so very subtle because it depends on the context. Saying no to protect your people/process is a good thing. Saying no because it is personally profitable to be disdainful of other's ideas while offering up none of your own, irrespective of what is good for the organization or your team, is not.

If one needs a mental picture, think of the quintessential hipster:

https://sabotagetimes.com/life/hipster-irony-is-destroying-o...

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#46

Post by toast0 »

OJFord wrote: post #12

Isn'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?

> If enabling swap 'fixes' it, isn't the proper fix to provision more memory?

Mr. No says all servers must match one of the existing configurations, none of which have very much ram.

If you're on the border where a little bit of swap gets you zero pages, and no swap gets you stuck machines, you probably need to figure out how to scale within your constraints, but a little bit of swap should be ok, in the neighborhood of 1GB gives you a little bit of breathing room without prolonging the inevitable for very long.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#47

Post by isostatic »

blueyes wrote: post #15

I 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.

That's not the lawyer's job - the lawyers' job is to present the risks, not to make the decisions as to whether the risk is worthwhile

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#48

Post by hinkley »

deleted_account wrote: post #30
shados wrote: post #8

I 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'…

"Chesterton's fence".

Chesterton's fence is about taking away things we don't understand.

There's a big gap between that and fighting cargo culting.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#49

Post by quickthrower2 »

I still have an internal no-man that says "Don't use OR's in where clauses" in my head from years ago, then I have to stop myself and think "OK lets actually test the performance of this particular query rather than rely on a no-man policy in another company from years ago"!

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#50

Post by novok »

shados wrote: post #8

I 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'…

That is why you write that in a standards document, along with the reasons why and have a consensus about it. That way it becomes impersonal.

Same thing with auto formatters and linters sidestepping a lot of pointless bickering and bike shedding.

Post reply on HN