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

101–110 of 151 posts

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

#101

Post by sidlls »

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'…

Even before I became the manager, as a Lead I felt half my time was explaining to younger, less experienced engineers why "no, we should not" introduce something.

And it really was an explanation, not a condescending or dismissive refusal. That part is key.

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

#102

Post by dilyevsky »

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?

Yes it is pretty standard in container environment (which is what borg is too) so that example kind of proved the opposite point.

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

#103

Post by egdod »

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.

Yes! I listened to a good bit of that audiobook, but it was such a pain having to puzzle out who was doing/saying things. I eventually gave up.

I mean... it was an interesting idea, writing a book that way because the characters sexes shouldn’t really matter. But in practice, it was a mess.

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

#104

Post by heavenlyblue »

rbavocadotree wrote: post #88
shados wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

JavaScript

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

#105

Post by zzo38computer »

rbavocadotree wrote: post #88
shados wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Automatic semicolon insertion

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

#106

Post by TravHatesMe »

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…

What a lovely team member to have. Everything should be questioned. This is how we get smarter. This is how we learn. Vocalizing your arguments helps convince yourself and others and validates (or invalidates) an idea.

Arguments put forth should be criticized and challenged. However this becomes difficult when egos come into the picture. There are stubborn engineers that will never accept that the possibility that they might be wrong. With this in mind, the "no man" cannot be the decision-maker, the "no man" should be playing the role of a lawyer.

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

#107

Post by no_wizard »

sidlls wrote: post #101
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'…

Even before I became the manager, as a Lead I felt half my time was explaining to younger, less experienced engineers why "no, we should not" introduce something. And it really was an explanation, not a condescending or dismissive refusal. That part is key.

I wish more places understood this. Change of leadership where I am is causing so many issues because there isn't any substantiated reasons why something is a 'no'. Its just 'no', and attempts to get clarifications and how to proceed in the future are met with little clarification (and sometimes ignored altogether)

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

#108

Post by romwell »

wfbarks wrote: post #35
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…

These where my thoughts, "No" guy could have a good reason for no swap. no swap might have been a fix for some other issue OP is unaware of, which OP has now reverted. Don't know until you ask...

>no swap might have been a fix

The chances of that are astronomically low. From the article:

>I later found out that all of our older machines had swap enabled. It was just the ones which had been replaced or reinstalled which had been popping up without it, perhaps as part of a policy change. That means it was perfectly valid for us to run with swap on, since most of the machines we owned were using it.

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

#109

Post by slewis »

I know exactly who she's talking about! When I was at the unnamed company I worked on a project that he retained control over and said no to a lot. We found that if we sent him a very well reasoned, documented and measured change he'd say yes.

I was there when the no swap policy was under lots of active discussion. It was there to ensure that application authors could have strong expectations on how long a memory access would take. Imagine trying to provide evidence that removing the "no swap" policy wouldn't affect any of the applications that were running across a very large infrastructure.

Her point really resounds though, this person was referred to all the time in conversation, "well, we probably couldn't get this past X". He was mythical. In general that was often a good thing. Making changes that could have such a broad impact should be well reasoned. But it's also quite annoying, having a nagging voice inside your head that just says "no", seemingly disconnected from the actual source.

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

#110

Post by shados »

zmj wrote: post #84
novok wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Often the "everyone else" have not been hired yet.

And they may never get hired and you still have to fight with them.

I'm, honestly, TERRIFIED of what "thought leaders" may post on hacker news/twitter/reddit tonight, tomorrow, next week. The moment I see one of them suggest something that just wouldn't work for us, I -know- I'm going to have to fight 50 people at work soon who drank the koolaid.

Post reply on HN