201–210 of 347 posts
Funny how she mentions dogs. In Dutch it is a common expression to say something like "And then of course he has to pee on it a bit". (Hij moet daar nog even een plasje over doen) to indicate exactly this behaviour.
I'm reminded of a blog post by an old govvie that hated this approach. His argument was that every time we work around a problem in our process, whether it was a bad system or an incompetent co-worker or manager, we became the problem. Every time we added a duck or built a workaround we were building frameworks that would hold a bad policy in place for longer than if we just stopped and said "that's stupid". Adding t…
That doesn't mean it's always the wrong decision, though. Sometimes, technical debt is the right trade-off. Sometimes the trade-off of teaching your boss just isn't worth the effort, and getting the job done quickly works out.
And, just like technical debt, doing this results is more problems for other people (including future-you) as your bad boss looks good and calcifies his bad habits and rises in the ranks.
Personally, my preferred solution is malicious compliance. If someone makes a stupid decision, they have them suffer the consequences of that stupidity rather than covering for them and letting them delude themselves that their bad decision was good. This only works on new decisions, though; if you try to remove existing work-arounds for old bad decisions, you're the one that looks bad.
Putting on my client/product manager hat for a moment, this is incredibly annoying. You are putting me in the position of either (a) fixing the obvious ducks and not looking closely at the real problems, or (b) having to micromanage you and scheduling another review to make further changes. Maybe you get your desired result (a), but my opinion of your work is going to be much lower since you are making obvious duck-s…
I think the fact that you started off with the assumption that the PM is competent illustrates the inherent entitlement problem with a lot of PMs in the software industry. Yes, PMs are highly important roles when done right. Companies who imitate companies that are successful (and who hires great people) picks up the PM role without picking up the culture of building good products or the hiring practices ends up with…
That's my experience with the type of person who tends to pull this sort of thing.
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Put more simply, sometimes you are the idiot. Don't make it worse for everyone by acting like it. Edit: that's a generic 'you', in case it's not obvious, not a reference to the parent.
Even if you specifically aren't the idiot (though I often am), never spend your time working around the idiot. Any time you work around an idiot, you've done more work and the idiot will still be there...
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The thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often. 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.
I used to play a racing game called Trackmania; there was no collision, but it was really competitive in that you'd be racing simultaneously networked w/ other players. You could definitely tell when you completed the lab in a time that was say 10ms behind a different time. 600 milliseconds, +- say 50ms, is pretty recognizable.
The story goes that you are supposed to make an obvious mistake, like a spelling error, on purpose. This will fulfill the clients' need to provide a critique and allow good designs to remain an option.
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…
This is something my friends did on a software engineering class. They were tasked to draw a set of complicated diagrams modeling a software project. When they gave the assignment, the PhD that was grading them said it's wrong and needs a lot of corrections and told them to come back next week with a fixed version. They didn't change anything and just gave the same version again for grading. Instant A.
(The other was one in an engineering thesis orientation class where one of the "teachers" said that "everything that could be invented has already been invented". I walked out immediately, followed by a few other people seconds later after some other comment.)
[1]: http://www.omg.org/spec/ [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_Case_Diagram
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...That guy is just an asshole. Not funny at all. He should just have declined instead of screwing around and wasting everybody's time.
I found it a little funny, but not funny enough to justify being that level of asshole.
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Even if you specifically aren't the idiot (though I often am), never spend your time working around the idiot. Any time you work around an idiot, you've done more work and the idiot will still be there...
I agree 100%. We are all idiots now and then, even when we're not purposefully trying to be by adding ducks.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM3InfEH-cU
>> "From the PC game Battle Chess (Enhanced) by Interplay. The reason I discovered I was into vore." I really, really shouldn't read even the descriptions on YouTube videos.