While I'll never "Show HN". Criticism can be delivered without it needing to feel like the gauntlet of pain
Being Slow to Criticise
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#22Bother ... I've not been keeping track and I've just realised I submitted this not so long ago. Apologies. I was prompted by the submission about "My seatbelt rule for judgment" here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30237457 Having realised I've returned to delete the submission, but find that I can't. /mea culpa/
Reposts are a good thing when done in a non-spammy way. I had never seen this before and now I have.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#23So how do you avoid getting nerd-sniped when something really is just bad? There's an analogue of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle here; any of us could slap out some code in half an hour (no doubt many of us have, myself included) and then any of us could spend days or weeks trying to understand why we did it that way. Taking the time to understand bad software is, like up-front planning, one of those things that so…
Sometimes, it helps to just put in the comments why you did something that you know is not optimal. Often you'll write "bad" code just because it makes sense. I had to update something last week where the requirements changed dramatically from when they were written. It's nobody's fault. When the requirements were written, we did really understand the problem. After the customer got the code in their hand, they wante…
If it's not you someone else may indeed want to refactor. They would like a crack at the designing from scratch
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#24A wise mentor once encouraged me, "Assume positive intent and ask lots of questions."
That directive has served extremely well ever since.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#25The Principal Engineer community in Amazon has a list of tenets. I think one of them puts it very eloquently. Respect What Came Before
Any chance you can share some of the other tenets? :P
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#26The Principal Engineer community in Amazon has a list of tenets. I think one of them puts it very eloquently. Respect What Came Before
Any chance you can share some of the other tenets? :P
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#27I recently had a small rant on Twitter about a certain web technology; I used the word "crap."
One of the main authors of the tech spotted my post and replied saying my rant was offensive and that they had worked hard and done the best they could.
It had been a long time since I felt that much shame in myself. It could have been me pouring myself into something and then the other guy calls it crap.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#28I recently had a small rant on Twitter about a certain web technology; I used the word "crap." One of the main authors of the tech spotted my post and replied saying my rant was offensive and that they had worked hard and done the best they could. It had been a long time since I felt that much shame in myself. It could have been me pouring myself into something and then the other guy calls it crap.
Because you have empathy you have learned a lesson. Lots of us make that mistake and learn from it. I'm glad you came clean about it. Now don't be shy about criticizing, just be more thoughtful about it.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#29There's a difference between being slow to criticize and completely withholding criticism. I agree that software is written by smart people, working under constraints.
But so what? If it sucks, it sucks, and we should call it out as such! How will we ever improve anything if we can't highlight what's wrong with the current solution?
My go-to example in this regard is the Microsoft Office ribbon. I remember, when the ribbon was introduced, I saw a presentation from a Microsoft employee (I can't remember if he was a developer or a product manager) going over the extensive testing that Microsoft did with focus groups to "prove" that the new UI was superior to the previous menu-based one. I remembered being both very impressed with the ostensible rigor of the process, and disappointed with the result. All that work, all that testing to delude themselves into believing that a UI where elements moved around, and weren't in predictable locations was going to be something that users (especially experienced users) would prefer.
And sure enough, even to this day, I still see users (both new and experienced) struggling with the ribbon. It sucks! And the fact that I know a lot of very smart people worked on it doesn't change that fact. In fact, it makes it worse. It would be one thing if such a horrid design were the result of a haphazard design process, implemented by incompetents. But it's not. It's the result of a lot of very smart people Goodharting themselves into believing that they've found the one weird trick to make their software both powerful and easy to use.
I strongly believe, that, if in the early days of the ribbon, someone had stood up and said, "This sucks!" things might have gone in a different direction.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#30A wise mentor once encouraged me, "Assume positive intent and ask lots of questions." That directive has served extremely well ever since.
Absolutely. And people with the best intentions can produce crap sometimes. That’s just reality. There’s a reason for that old saying about good intentions.