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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)

#71

Post by Aloha »

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…

Change for the sake of change is almost always bad, making decisions without considering externalities is worse.

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

#73

Post by Aloha »

scarejunba wrote: post #39
jacquesm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have Slack threads risen to the level of documentation now?

A principle I have is that I lower the barrier for others to contribute the things I want to see more of. Rather than holding a Slack thread up as the apotheosis of documentation, I recognize that I am more likely to receive wisdom if I allow for a Slack thread to be sufficient. It's just a permanent link to a conversation. This is reinforced by the additional fact that the people with the most I have to learn from a…

I'm a big believer in apply postel is interpersonal communications. Particularly in the emotional realm.

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

#74

Post by mobjack »

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…

The way you deal with a "no" guy is to ask for forgiveness instead of permission.

Put the responsibility on yourself to make the decision instead of passing it off to others.

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

#75

Post by mr_tristan »

I don't think this is necessarily about people who are critical, it's that you can have someone who is just as stupid as a "yes man": they just say "no" just because instead of, you know, actually thinking.

I don't believe this "no man" is someone who is managing their attention or saying no for an actual reason. They're just contrary. And yeah, there's a lot of them around.

What I actually find even more frequently are "parrots". These are people who "learn by runbook". Instead of asking why something is done a particular way, they want to learn how to parrot some procedure. It's another variation of things: instead of saying "yes", or "no", they just parrot "process X".

I think this is really where the "no swap in production" example came from. I've seen _lots_ of stupid similar ideas in software development.

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

#76

Post by shados »

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".

The opposite. In this case people saying no are the ones understanding, and people complaining about them are the ones who don't have the full context. Of course the job of the people saying no becomes to document this, but at large enough scale its hard to get people to read the documentation...(and even when they do, its hard to internalize it).

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

#77

Post by azernik »

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…

1. The Mr. No guy was clearly well known for actions that involved no personal action but were publicly visible, e.g. commit messages.

2. Said problem was OOMs on machines with swapoff

3. Yup

4. It's pretty easy to get someone's measure from reputation if you have multiple independent sources - enough to fully distrust Mr. No's judgment. If this person is high enough in the chain that she's getting his orders second-hand, it also may not be very easy or fast to get his attention or a face-to-face meeting. So she made her change, publicly stated she was making it, and allowed him to countermand her (with a snarky "he can have my pager" to force him to justify his decision if he wanted to reverse the decision).

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

#78

Post by hinkley »

dredmorbius wrote: post #60
hinkley wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chesterton's fence is about taking away things we don't understand. There's a big gap between that and fighting cargo culting.

CF is about, generally, changing a thing without understanding why it was set a given way in the first place. Where it is necessary to change (or to make changes) without full understanding, at the very least, instrument and observe for some time. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence

Yes, about changing the status quo.

Aping someone else's fancy, new solution is not the status quo. You have no way of knowing how badly they have steamrolled Chesterton's Fence.

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

#79

Post by shados »

monksy wrote: post #66
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'…

> it quickly (very quickly) get out of control javascript

JavaScript is indeed a very good example of this. Not just in the ecosystem, but even just the standard itself. People are pushing for more and more stuff. People on the committee can say "no", but there's an infinite amount of bullshit to push, and only a limited amount of time to push back. So sooner or later, bullshit makes it in.

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

#80

Post by shados »

novok wrote: post #50
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.

That works for things you want to DO, but is hard for things you DON'T want to do.

As I mentioned in another post, as your org grows, there's going to be an infinite amount of things people push, and pushing back is hard. If you have to stop and write a consensus document for every single one, you'll be doing nothing else.

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