The most important part of a fast car is good brakes.
As opposed to stuck brakes, or ones that activate at random.
You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
141–150 of 151 posts
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
She left Facebook early this year, IIRC.
Early 2018
It probably was late 2018 then. I don't know the specific dates because I don't work there anymore. All I remember is that I left a couple of months after her (uncorrelated with her leaving) and I left early this year.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In which case you have poor decision makers, not poor lawyers.
The benefit of domain aware lawyers is they can explain the specific risks and help the decision makers apply those risks to the business.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#144Earlier 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?
arrow functions
curried functions
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it to say "these are the types of things we want to do. anything must look like these types of things in terms of (insert x y and z criteria: size, scale, opportunity, profitability, growth, etc) spoiler alert: it isn't hard and this is what we do at my startup that is currently experiencing hyper growth and is on multiple "unicorn" lists
I can't even tell if it's satire. But if it's not: I haven't see it be done easily over several hundred engineers. If you have that kind of charisma, hat off to you!
Charisma is certainly something I have never been told I lack. Maybe we are lucky and have the right people as well.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#146Earlier 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.
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.
With things you don't want to do, you make it concise with a whitelist. Like 'we only use these 2 languages for our backend and here is why:'.
If you have the authority to tell people no in the first place to make it stick, you have the ability to write that in a wiki page. You can go full FAQ mode for the miscellaneous stuff as it comes up.
Documenting the why is really important, so you don't get zombie decisions self perpetuating in your org and allow for change.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#147Earlier 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.
If something is written down before you were even hired and it says no, then you know that the people are saying 'no' not because they don't like you or some other petty interpersonal political reason, but because of the actual technical reasons or some overarching political reason unrelated to you, personally.
When something isn't personal, it diffuses a lot of emotional tension. Our monkey brains jump to taking things personally way too easily probably as some sort of early tribal instinct for survival.
I don't really understand what you mean by personal otherwise? I was implying 'personal' was specific person personal.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#148There's also the Maybe guy. All this guy ever says are things like "Maybe that's possible," "in theory that maybe could work," "I'm not sure if that will work."
The thing that the maybe guy differs from the Yes or the No guy is that he's always 100% correct. He's never wrong ever.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#149Isn'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…
1. The article states that the older machines had swap enabled, so they weren't homogenous anyway;
2. At some point you do have to change configuration, and if you have insufficient memory on one you either have insufficient memory on all machines, or a badly distributed workload.
Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what it meant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
does it ? > Reagan used the phrase to emphasize "the extensive verification procedures that would enable both sides to monitor compliance with the treaty"
But you have to look at why he used that particular phrasing–a clever bit of wordplay to quickly get the idea across to Russians in familiar terms. It's a Russian figure of speech in the first place.