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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)

#81

Post by daotoad »

freehunter wrote: post #51
drewg123 wrote: post #32

A powerful "no man" can be a valuable asset sometimes. I was involved in the design of an ASIC. This was going to be used by people from all different areas of the company, and they all had various demands. Most had never worked on a chip before, and didn't realize the cost of what they were asking for. The easy thing to do would have been to ensure that every requested feature was added But that would have burned ar…

I have an unofficial board of advisors for my small company, and one of them is a "No Man". I knew that when I asked him to join. Every time the company has an idea, this guy will shut it down immediately. He forces us to defend every single decision. Do we always listen to him? No. Does he always win? No. Is he always right? Absolutely not. But I keep him around because he forces everyone in the company to defend ev…

Every company really, really, really....really needs someone like that.

Imagine how much better the Star Wars prequels could have been if only Lucasfilm had a strong No Person to stop them from doing stupid shit.

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

#82

Post by kev009 »

Honestly saying no is one of the most important things either a startup or large company can have. Saying no gracefully, respectfully, and having the receiving person understand the rational is the hard part. This is one of the function of "fellows", "Senior Members of the Technical Staff", "Principal Architects" or whatever your org calls it and the people selected for that should be excellent at it. I guess the problem the author points out is that is the only thing a person might do and that is not good. Folks in this position should also know how to say yes and build buyin from business people/exec/program management.

Most organizations fail horribly at saying no. Instead they try to silo things to cope. This works to some extent, and you will always have silos as a company grows up, but you really should never end up with 12 programming languages, 5 RDBMS, 4 NoSQL DBs, 3 Javascript frameworks, 3 CIs, 3 cluster schedulers and then all the aforementioned also duplexed across organization units. That level of sprawl reduces margins, increases onboarding time, stresses even the most experienced staff, and makes adaption and business decision making murky at best.

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

#83

Post by sitkack »

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?

Wait what? How do machines running K8s exec processes when they are near their physical memory limit? Swap does more than just provide a place for pages to get evicted to, it also increases the virtual address space.

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

#84

Post by zmj »

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.

It's still personal: it's "authors of the document" vs everyone else. Often the "everyone else" have not been hired yet.

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

#85

Post by Aeolun »

cortesoft wrote: post #17
raldi wrote: post #3

I'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 in…

It’s like the monkeys being shocked every time one of them goes for the banana.

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

#86

Post by fanf2 »

cortesoft wrote: post #17
raldi wrote: post #3

I'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 in…

It is super important that policies are mutable, that they can change with changes in circumstances and knowledge. They should be as easy to change as the org chart.

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

#87

Post by Aeolun »

isostatic wrote: post #47
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

In theory. In practice it often turns out that the decision makers think that any risk at all is unacceptable, giving the lawyers de-facto control.

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

#88

Post by rbavocadotree »

shados wrote: post #79
monksy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What are examples of bs in the javascript standard?
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