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“Just remove the duck” (2013)

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#211

Post by samf »

I have thought about the same tactic if you are selling your house, and the potential buyer is bringing an inspector.

"Break" three things in your house, e.g., remove the cover from a bathroom exhaust fan, loosen a faucet so that it rattles, and remove all of the light bulbs from an overhead fixture. The inspector will find these, the buyers will require that they be fixed, and it will be easy for you to do so.

If you don't do this, the inspector will find three other things.

Of course this would only work if your house doesn't need any significant work done in the first place.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#212

Post by pluma »

jimmaswell wrote: post #167
wambotron wrote: post #20

I worked at a deli during college, and people did this same type of thing on slices. By default, I'd always pick a pretty thin slice. Most people really like thinly sliced meats. The first thing you do is slice once and show them the slice, making sure it fits what they wanted. 99% of the time, people would say "thinner," I would pretend to fiddle with the knob, slice the same thickness, and they'd say "perfect!" I t…

>Most people really like thinly sliced meats Why would you want thinly sliced meat? That doesn't make any sense to me.

It changes the surface feel of the meat.

The concept shouldn't be too puzzling. There's a whole class of cooking (molecular gastronomy) entirely based on taking this to the extreme.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#213

Post by TeMPOraL »

estebank wrote: post #207
TeMPOraL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had a teacher telling us to change a 120 pages long document back and forth three times. The third time we showed her the hardcopies with her revisions and hand waved it away, trying to gaslight saying it wasn't her handwriting(!). Same person saying that the hardcopy we had of the OMG.org specs[1] was wrong (same class, I believe it was a different day) because she wanted Use Case Diagram[2] didn't have arrows den…

Huh, teachers. I had one teaching computer architecture who treated Linda Null's book as a Holy Bible of the course. She liked to correct students by saying "you're wrong, you haven't read Linda Null, go read the book". It was fine until the point when she disagreed with what someone wrote on the test - and when that person has pointed out that it's straight from the book, she shrugged and said, "well, Linda Null is wrong". sigh

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#214

Post by AceJohnny2 »

LanceH wrote: post #9

This is classic military when presenting anything to an officer for review. I've definitely read references of it going back to WWII (intentional, obvious oil smudge on otherwise pristine rifle). It was frequently stated that no officer could leave a document unedited after review, so an obvious misspelling or two would be added. It's a way of life on the military, really.

Zawinsky's classic quote "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.", was apparently based on military humor where the serviceman thinks to ask an officer...

http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#215

Post by smacktoward »

chrismbarr wrote: post #206

I've heard of (but never tried) a similar thing done when showing design concepts to a client. Usually several variations are prepared, and if you're any good they will all be viable options. When presenting to a client they will normally want to try and critique something regardless of how good the designs actually are. The story goes that you are supposed to make an obvious mistake, like a spelling error, on purpos…

The variation on this that I'm familiar with relies on our perception of three as a magic number for choices: two options doesn't feel like a real choice, four feels like too many choices, but three is perfect. So when you're presenting design concepts, you show three: the one you want the client to pick, another that's very similar to the one you want the client to pick but with some obvious glitch in it, and a third that's so atrociously ugly nobody would choose it. The client goes for the one you want them to go for every time.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#216

Post by pflats »

samf wrote: post #211

I have thought about the same tactic if you are selling your house, and the potential buyer is bringing an inspector. "Break" three things in your house, e.g., remove the cover from a bathroom exhaust fan, loosen a faucet so that it rattles, and remove all of the light bulbs from an overhead fixture. The inspector will find these, the buyers will require that they be fixed, and it will be easy for you to do so. If yo…

It'll only work if your buyer hires a terrible home inspector.

The last time I bought a house, the inspector worked for hours. In the end, I got a 14-page write-up, plus accompanying photos of any major defects and/or code violations.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#217

Post by acdha »

pluma wrote: post #154
acdha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a good time for many of us to work on social skills: most people like getting help with a second language as long as it's not putting them on the spot & if you have a good relationship with someone you can bring it up at the right time more along the lines of “Isn't English so absurdly arbitrary?” than something to be defensive about.

I think this is being unnecessarily non-confrontational. As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead, I can't see how any serious programmers should take offence. Consider it this way: natively speaking English means you have domain knowledge, sharing that domain knowledge should feel no different from pointing out mistakes in other domains. If someone gets English…

> As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead

I think we're generally in agreement – I was trying to keep the focus on things which can be reasonably be considered objectively wrong and keeping the degree of wrongness in mind when deciding how to handle it. If you're on the low end of that scale, it's probably not a good use for everyone's time in a code-review session unless it happens a lot.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#218

Post by sstradling »

samf wrote: post #211

I have thought about the same tactic if you are selling your house, and the potential buyer is bringing an inspector. "Break" three things in your house, e.g., remove the cover from a bathroom exhaust fan, loosen a faucet so that it rattles, and remove all of the light bulbs from an overhead fixture. The inspector will find these, the buyers will require that they be fixed, and it will be easy for you to do so. If yo…

This brings up the other problem I have with adding ducks (yes, I'm anti-duck). Humans tend to fixate on the obvious - the more obvious problems you have, the more we'll fixate on them. That's great if people are just meddling, and you want to keep them occupied, but it's horrible if there might actually be flaws of consequence in your work. Given that we often tend to think we're more competent than we actually are, trying to game the review process may keep real, serious problems from being fixed.

With my work, a lot of reviewers do love to hear themselves talk, but every so often they'll come back at you with really good, insightful stuff that I totally missed. I don't dare game them because I don't want to be putting out garbage.

Except for CH. We totally owe her a duck.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#219

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

MarkyC4 wrote: post #40
chestervonwinch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or maybe they don't want to appear rude or finnicky by pointing out that it looks the same?

This was my thought too. I've already asked you to "fix it for me" once. I feel to do so again would just be rude (and wasteful as now 2 slices would have to be put aside for another person, or thrown out)

By extension, asking for a change in itself is presumptuous, so coming back with the same product is returning the favor.

Re: “Just remove the duck” (2013)

#220

Post by Dylan16807 »

agarden wrote: post #81
TallGuyShort wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this anecdote might help explain Jobs's success. There is a tendency when one is running or developing a product to convince yourself that your efforts are producing a genuinely good product that your customers will like. Frequently that isn't true, and the product is rightly trashed by the outsiders. The thing is, the people on the inside would have trashed it too if they had not been insiders. Jobs seems to…

Being able to tell the difference between the tiniest of arbitrary changes doesn't mean it's better. The anecdote could equally show how he's pointlessly stubborn.

All the praise in your comment only really works if the change is a clear improvement.

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