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Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

earthly.dev

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Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#151

Post by lmm »

nickcox wrote: post #123
teddyh wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test coverage is almost the perfect illustration of Goodhart’s law. Good programming practices do result in high test coverage, coverage is very easy to measure, but very easy to fake with useless “tests”. So, when the coverage is measured, the coverage goes up, but stops being meaningful.

High coverage isn't enough but, in my experience, it's a great place to start. I've written an depressingly high quantity of code in my career that blows up literally the first time it runs. I'd much rather that happen in a unit test than in production. Any test that exercises a given branch is better than nothing.

Coverage can tell you what you didn't test, but it can't tell you what you did test.

> Any test that exercises a given branch is better than nothing.

I disagree with this. If you have a test that doesn't actually test anything, you can't tell that you're not really testing that branch. No test is better than a bad test because it's easier to fix.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#152

Post by lmm »

bennyelv wrote: post #147
oxfordmale wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen bad unit test being introduced when engineering management starts enforcing a threshold (80% coverage). Often developers will scramble to test trivial methods, such getter and setters, but will not write any suitable tests that actually cover the business logic. It is even worse when management only enforce a 80% coverage for new changes. In those scenarios developers go out of their way to encapsulate ch…

I think most people, including the managers are aware of the problem you've highlighted. What's the solution?

The solution is don't measure test coverage. Measure something you actually care about, like minutes of downtime.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#153

Post by unhammer »

zimpenfish wrote: post #140
gumby wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A side point: the hedgehog/fox analogy originated with philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Technically, I suppose, it was Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing." Tetlock seems to have a slightly different interpretation to Berlin - (paraphrased from [1]) "hedgehogs have one grand theory; foxes are skeptical about grand theories". [1] https://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-bett...

I was immediately reminded of the fable of the Fox and the Cat (in which the Cat wins because following its one heuristic takes no time while the Fox has to deliberate to find the best of its many smart solutions – and the dogs are coming fast). Apparently the tales are related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Cat_(fable)#Th...

(while Aesop's https://aesopsfables.org/F89_The-Fox-and-the-Hedgehog.html is completely unrelated, though also interesting!)

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#154

Post by iainmerrick »

spyckie2 wrote: post #35

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…

Your response to this article about how contingent advice is usually better than universal advice is to propose a universal theory?

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#155

Post by onion2k »

anw wrote: post #31

It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…

being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?)

The problematic load in a dashboard isn't users; it's querying the data sources to get up to date information. For example, if you're running a query to aggregate a bunch of things with lots of joins and that query takes 1.5s to run but your dashboard tries to run it every second so it can be 'real time' then you're in for a bad time even with just 1 user. You absolutely need to load test a dashboard application that's running against production data.

being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes down then (it's not a vital part of any platform)

It might not be vital right now, but if you make a dashboard for it then it'll quickly become vital. Putting metrics in front of people focuses them on those metrics...

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#156

Post by dgb23 »

When I started programming professionally I relatively quickly became something worse than a hedgehog. I was so excited about opinionated thought leaders, there was so much to learn and there were all these experts leading the way. But I was basically an overconfident parrot who didn't know what he was talking about.

Then I got experience and deeper insight so I became a hedgehog, because that seemed the thing to aspire to. However not for long, because I started to suffer from the lack of nuance that hedgehogs sometimes have.

Now I'm a confused wannabe fox. I want to be a fox, or rather I cannot be a hedgehog or parrot, but I'm in a continuous state of confusion and doubt and have an impatient urge to know more about everything. When it is required of me I can be pragmatic and clear, but those are snapshots given the circumstance.

One could also say I'm a curious and critical thinker. But that would be an euphemism. I wish I could be a hedgehog and act on it, while having a peace of mind.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#157

Post by AstralStorm »

jerf wrote: post #49
catlifeonmars wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The minor conclusion of this article was the more interesting (and perhaps more practical) of the two: Hide concessions to various leaders in the project roadmap. This isn’t just a “bureaucratic trick” as the OP suggested, it’s actually a way to convert unconditional advice into contingent advice, by encoding a priority.

Yeah, that's not so much a "nifty bureaucracy hack" as a core skill to completing any project. It doesn't even have to be 20 unrelated people's feedback... it's my own priorities quite often that I mercilessly stuff on the backlog. YAGNI isn't just at the micro code level, it's a core project design skill. In fact I probably YAGNI my roadmap much harder than my code since I often have a good idea that I will in fact…

And then some to level priorities shift and you look at the backlog thinking "if only we have done x before that".

Usually when your unfinished prototype ends up in production. That's the danger of reporting progress to people who think you can go to space on a paper glider.

Probably half of more of start-ups end up failing like this as their quickly delivered prototype fails to capture the market due to not being actually better enough, or crumble under the initial success.

Good for investors and managers who bail out early enough, very bad for users.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#158

Post by krmboya »

spyckie2 wrote: post #35

Being a hedgehog is useful on the journey to domain mastery because sticking to frameworks saves you time and headache compared to not having any frameworks at all. The 3 stages of domain mastery: Stage 1 - No knowledge or structure to approach a domain (everything is hard, pitfalls are everywhere) Stage 2 - Frameworks that are useful to approach the domain (Map to avoid pitfall areas) Stage 3 - Detailed understandin…

What you've described suspiciously resembles the 'midwit' meme.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#159

Post by austincheney »

quetzthecoatl wrote: post #139
austincheney wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people agree with this. The actual challenge is to discern real rules from superficial bullshit. That is a level of criticality many people do not possess and some find hostile or disgusting.

especially when there are too many such rule lists often contridicting with each other. Finding the right list becomes the key for someone (beginner to a domain) who has to follow the rules. That's just luck.

It’s even more implicit than that. For example there are social criteria and considerations of vanity.

Another example is that I recently wrote a comment that received greater than 10 votes and was flagged (I presume by users) almost immediately. The comment was thus both commonly agreeable (perhaps people could empathize to the subject matter) and yet a violation of social norms. An unspoken social rule violation.

That comment also received contradictory responses: I’m not woke, but.... Contradictory responses are generally an explicit mention of internal confusion where the person cannot even agree with themselves on social conformance: I’m not lying, but.... If it’s not complete bullshit then don’t posture with a qualifier.

Re: Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

#160

Post by zimpenfish »

fctorial wrote: post #143
zimpenfish wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously though, rsync is your friend. :-) Even rsync might not be atomic enough for some situations[1] since it'll update files as it goes rather than in one huge transaction at the end. [1] I worked on the World Cup 2006 site for Yahoo! and we had this issue - solved with 'rsync --link-dest' and swapping symlinks.

Write a script. 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service

> 1. stop service 2. copy files 3. start service

That assumes you can stop the service which, for many things (like the World Cup website), isn't really possible.

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