DuckDuckGo was down • Hacker News Board

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#101

Post by mrosett » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

cvik wrote: post #85

jackdecker wrote: post #9

All I know is that I would not want to be the one who had last committed to production.

Good teams don't blame individuals. You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team. Hopefully at least two people reviewed the commit before it was put into production. Someone set up the post-launch smoke-tests/api-test-suits. Someone built the CI/CD-system. Etc etc. My point is, it is rarely a single individuals fault when something at this scale goes down.

You're absolutely right both about how teams should function and about the reality of how failures happen.

But the parent is right that it still sucks to be the persons whose work was the proximate cause of an outage, even if nobody is going to blame/punish you for it. It doesn't make for a day where you feel good when you get home from work.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#102

Post by nitrogen » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

matt-attack wrote: post #68

baddox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autocomplete in the search bar still works, so there’s some data out there.

I would have thought that the type of person compelled to use DDG, would disable autocomplete.

If I remember correctly their autocomplete might use probabilistic data structures to preserve some privacy, so you download a set of random completions rather than just a single completion. But I don't know where I read that or if it was implemented.

Re: DuckDuckGo was down

#103

Post by godelski » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #99

godelski wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think a lot of praise should generally be a team thing too (but I also love this: "You can praise individuals, but you take blame as a team.") When discussing success to an outside group (giving a presentation or something) or higher up (especially here!) you always use "we". Even if it is a section that only you worked on or you did most of the work. You can often pick out good managers by just seeing if they…

I also really like it when managers mention significant individuals (as suggested by the phrasing that started this thread), as long as everyone on the team is getting mention-worthy projects. Both group and individual recognition, as long as it's fairly used.

Yes, exactly. I don't want to downplay the importance of praising individuals, but at the same time I don't want it to shadow praising teams.

There's a balance and I do think we tend to focus on the individual as a society. We can only climb mountains by standing on the shoulders of giants. One person gets to the peak and we should praise them for that, but we shouldn't ignore their foundation either (which I think currently happens). E.G. Kepler was an essential part of science and needs to be recognized, but if it wasn't for the work that Tycho Brahe did, Kepler's achievements couldn't exist. The "single person" mentality ignores the importance of the foundational work that needed to be done and frequently causes many to feel that they are not achieving simply because they are working in these roles, which are essential.