Untitled topic • Hacker News Board

Re: undefined

#11

Post by webo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:40 PM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #3

I really want to share this with my colleagues, because it's funny. But I really don't want anyone in management finding out that things like Haystack exist. What a shame.

That depends on your company culture. We introduced a tool like that and it’s been helpful for both for management and eng teams to start meaningful discussions — e.g PRs are taking long to review (e.g perceived as not high priority), PR sizes are getting bigger (e.g hard for the reviewer), some people review way more PRs than others (e.g bottlenecks), bug vs chore vs feature PR trends, new code vs refactoring trends, etc.

Need to have the right people who are asking the right questions.

Re: undefined

#12

Post by hncurious » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

It'd be interesting to see what would happen if facebook and twitter were down for a week or month.

Re: undefined

#13

Post by JohnJamesRambo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

The mental drain of the world exerted by social media is completely enormous. It explains so much about the dystopia we find ourselves in.

What happened to the talks of breaking up Big Tech? It seems to have disappeared.

Re: undefined

#14

Post by pcj-github » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

A lot of assumptions about causality based on weak data here. This company is just trying to capitalize on what is perceives as an inbound marketing opportunity. Next.

Re: undefined

#15

Post by durovo » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

I don't use Facebook, so don't care much about that but my productivity would definitely increase (temporarily?) if HN goes down.

Re: undefined

#16

Post by rPlayer6554 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:45 PM UTC

I don't think the data supports their conclusion.

> the Facebook outage started at 15:24 UTC.

> Between 21:00 UTC and midnight, we saw roughly a 2.6x increase in the number of Pull Requests being merged.

> midnight UTC aligns with 17:00 Pacific time (where many Haystack customers are located).

So even according to their own metrics, there were 5 and a half hours where the issue was (at least partially) occuring but there was no change.

Re: undefined

#17

Post by KingOfCoders » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

I wonder, as a developer I cancelled my Facebook account years ago, but others are still on board I guess.

Re: undefined

#18

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

pcj-github wrote: post #14

A lot of assumptions about causality based on weak data here. This company is just trying to capitalize on what is perceives as an inbound marketing opportunity. Next.

exactly. They have a plausible (but hardly confident) story based on their not very clear raw data (without using actual research methods on it), and turned it into marketing, that's it.

Re: undefined

#19

Post by belly_joe » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

durovo wrote: post #15

I don't use Facebook, so don't care much about that but my productivity would definitely increase (temporarily?) if HN goes down.

Yeah in my experience the need to be distracted can always find an expression even after eliminating individual outlets.

Still, there are marginal benefits to reducing the quality of the distraction by banning myself from those I most enjoy.

Re: undefined

#20

Post by PragmaticPulp » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 1:49 PM UTC

They counted pull requests merged during a few hours while Facebook was down. I’m guessing the number of PRs merged during any 5-hour window is extremely volatile, so it’s not surprising that they found it different than average when sampled randomly.

This reads like someone wanted to capitalize on the Facebook outage to get some traffic, so they threw their developers under the bus for some clickbait.

I wonder how good their presumably hard-working developers feel about the company blog implying that they’re all using so much Facebook that their productively suffers by a measurable amount every day.