141–150 of 347 posts
>> The sacrificial duck kept the meddling manager away from the stuff that was important. The territorial dog analogy is perfect. I've seen parks where they put fake fire hydrants and other features in the dog area so they can feel satisfied without leaving their designated area.
I'd love a exhaustive course on this kind of fakery.
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One of the famous tricks in ops consulting is to disconnect the knobs. Shift A likes this oven temperature, shift B likes that oven temperature, etc.
One of the aircraft in the US Presidential fleet, SAM 970, had a fake temperature control knob on the conference room desk. It was installed for then-VP Johnson, who was something of a control freak and who kept coming up to the cockpit to fiddle with the temperature. (The knob actually sent a signal to the pilots, who would adjust the temperature in the general direction that LBJ had tried to adjust it.) Source: lea…
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Yes it's a move which works when people demand changes in order to leave their mark or to be seen as "doing something"[0], it doesn't work in the case of people demanding changes because they actually want these changes. [0] an attitude I find myself unthinkingly adopting when doing reviews.
i have the guilts reviewing work of non native english speakers and asking them to rename functions after review. hard to ask for it without it seeming completely petty, particularly when everything else is perfect. it does represent a minor improvement.
Naming is important. Bad function names are a bug in the API, just like any other API bug.
Non-native speakers frequently struggle naming things even more than native speakers, especially when they have to deal with a problem domain for the first time.
Just like any other mistake, bad function names usually aren't intentional -- often quite the opposite. I remember struggling with naming business domain related functions and variables in the first booking system I worked on, especially because the UI wasn't localized into English, so I had no direct reference. Should this class be called Invoice or Bill? Are the terms "netto" and "brutto" commonly used in English as they are in German? What's the proper plural of "index"? And so on.
Having tactful help from a native speaker can be a huge advantage.
I hate this story. I think it's important to differentiate between people who have the right knowledge to request a change and those that think they have the right solely because of seniority; but it's also rather disrespectful to 'cheat' and make fake changes just to make the someone happy. No-one deserves to be treated like a 'mark' for our tricks. My experience has been that being honest, polite and knowledgeable…
But why does it sound like cheating? If the manager is not susceptible to this phenomenon, then they will let the duck stay. Why does it matter either way? It just makes any revisions easy if the manager is prone to this effect.
We none of us are perfect, we all have our flaws, but being tricky is not something we need to do; at the very least, it's not something I would wish to spend any time in my life doing.
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Not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but I had a professor who had worked as a designer under Steve Jobs and tried something similar. Steve insisted that a new mouse needed to be just a fraction of a millimetre slimmer so a person's palm was lower and closer to the work surface. They figured he was being an unreasonable "delicate genius" and returned a few days later with the identical mouse and claimed they had reworked it to…
There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed: Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to Page’s open cubicle office for a review. As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face. “It’s too slow,” Page said. Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted. It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the pa…
You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work.
It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.
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If you haven't read this before, I highly recommend: http://www.27bslash6.com/missy.html
...That guy is just an asshole. Not funny at all. He should just have declined instead of screwing around and wasting everybody's time.
A story from the time recounts that Piero Soderino, the head of the powerful Florentine Republic, even told the famously irascible Michelangelo that David's nose was much too large. Michelangelo then hid some marble dust in his hand, climbed back up his ladder and pretended to do some more "chiseling" on the offending proboscis. While he did so, he let some marble dust fall from his hand. The pompous Soderino was foo…
There are countless fables about record company executives dropping by the mastering studio to hear the new hit in its finished form. They'd inevitably make some ill-posed request, of the familiar "it needs to pop more!" variety. The wily engineer directs them towards a large and important looking knob, telling them that they are free to dial in as much "pop" as they think the track needs. Of course, they screw up th…
Early in my life, I programmed synths in a studio - and I practiced a variation on this. I would listen to what sound they wanted, then I would play them something that was likely pretty close. They they would complain about it not being quite right, so I would play 3 or 4 different sounds that I knew were completely wrong, then return to the first sound. To which they would invariably say "yeah that one - that's perfect!"
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They know. They just think you're bad at working the slicer and don't want to make that interaction an ordeal. That's what I've thought every single time I say "thinner" and they come back and it isn't thinner.
This is what happens to me too. I feel bad for the wasted cold cuts. So I'll give them two tries, one attempt and one adjustment, next time I'll wait for the person who does it better.
Which means less work for wambotron. Assuming that wambotron was paid hourly and not on commission basis, wambotron does less work for more pay, which is effectively a raise.