Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Eeach time a little less, until quitting seems better.
How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
161–170 of 220 posts
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think about it from the other side: Dealing with the infrastructure is your job. You know the ins and outs. It doesn't seem complicated to you. For someone who is dealing with the application logic, having to context switch to infrastructure is painful. I have no idea how you have set things up. When I read your documentation I'm just baffled at the sheer amount of complexity. I don't want to deal with it. It's not m…
The drain I am talking about is a complete lack of due diligence on behalf of those asking for my help (and my limited time/attention). When the error message contains a clear message and a URL with step-by-step instructions, and the person in question just pastes the full error message including the URL, and asks "what do I do?" When a problem can be solved by responding with "please follow the instructions in the e…
I've been in your shoes and I've accepted this fate.
I am the expert. I know things. I choose to change my viewpoint to taking pride in making the best possible explanation that serves the users' need. When they ask me "what do I do?" I no longer snicker or sigh that they don't know or that they are too lazy to find out. Instead I copy-paste the answer they need. It takes me seconds, perhaps it saves them thinking. Thinking seems hard to some people. I choose to believe I save the company some time when I think for them.
Yes, they do not learn when they are spoon-fed the answers. Yes, they could have figured it out. So what if they didn't? They are producing whatever they are supposed to produce.
When I get too tired of the same questions, I change jobs. I am in a C-level position now, and somehow the questions from other C-level managers are similar. They have no idea how they should deal with things from my business area, and that's okey. I'm here to help. I help. When I get too tired of the same questions, I will change jobs.
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think about it from the other side: Dealing with the infrastructure is your job. You know the ins and outs. It doesn't seem complicated to you. For someone who is dealing with the application logic, having to context switch to infrastructure is painful. I have no idea how you have set things up. When I read your documentation I'm just baffled at the sheer amount of complexity. I don't want to deal with it. It's not m…
> My intuition is that this complexity is not actually needed if you remove all the cruft and think from first principles about what the actual problem is you are trying to solve. Have you ever worked on infrastructure? This comment is wrong on soo many levels.
> Have you ever worked on infrastructure?
Not really. From an application perspective you can generally get away with two really big servers (one of which is the backup), and a load balancer.
There may be more involved in the surrounding infra, but that’s stuff the application developer will never have to touch.
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know your frustration and pain, but as someone frequently on the other side of the equation trying to seek out answers, it is often difficult-to-impossible. Just this past week I was working through some infra setup challenges, I had to piece together half a dozen different documents, several README files, and a few archived slack threads. These sources often are outdated or even contradicted each other. Even after…
No, no. This sounds completely different. You searched out all the information you could, and still had no idea. That’s great (I mean, not great, ideally the necessary information would have been available, but that’s on the people providing the information). The problem is people that have not searched or tried at all, and then ask their senior to please do their job for them.
There is a classic article about this issue which is from Harvard Business Review in 1974 and is about monkeys. a Must Read.
https://www.academia.edu/36290372/Monkey https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsd...
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#165As a member of a core infra/"foundation" team, the biggest drain on my soul is the number of other engineers that are helpless, or never learned how to find solutions on their own. They never search wikis, look for similar posts on internal groups, or even read the error message from the tool that tells them exactly how to fix the problem they're asking about. When the culture has become "google everything", but you…
I am working at company that just won a contract with a BigCo and it has to be one of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had. I was asked to test a configuration change and I was able to demonstrate that it worked locally in 15 minutes. Unfortunately, testing locally isn't enough so now I need to test it in the lab, but BigCo is so compartmentalised that it can weeks even to organise a meeting where all the…
> I just don't understand how you get to the point where that's business as usual.
Simple, just get 100 junior developers working on the same product, and make the Project Managers’s manage them.
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#166Read Dan Luu's article about normalization of deviance, or Dan Na's talk "pushing through friction". https://blog.danielna.com/talks/pushing-through-friction/
Dan Luu's article: http://danluu.com/wat/
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope that world-stopping software (banks, critical infrastructure, healthcare, etc) have tests and all the things to prevent catastrophic error. For the rest of us, breaking things here and there in the name of moving faster is (anecdotally) more fun.
I think there exists something in between world-stopping as in healthcare (I want way more than just 'tests' there) and Facebook level (i.e. nobody really cares even though a lot of people will probably scream in "agony" when things don't work). To maybe put it into examples: World stopping: Traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) has a bug that lets planes crash into each other. Don't care: Not enough vegetarian m…
> healthcare
most of healthcare software (that i have worked with) is really, really bad.
The fact that it mostly has no tests, or if it has tests they mainly test just the happy route.
They usually have lots of documentation, but it's not comprehensive and mostly just describes the happy paths, so when thing break you are out of luck. Also can't google anything since this are all closed source enterprise type software, so you are at the mercy of their support, that often also sucks.
And if you have to integrate with it, you often can't get the documentation, or tools to do it unless you are working for one of their VARs. And the VAR's are often even worse.
If you pick random 10 high school kids, get them into some code academy for a 6 months, and then have them develop an application, the ones that finish will probably be better than majority of health care software out there (for simple reason that they won't know enough to really screw up as bad.).
The only saving grace is, that its often written in Java so you can find workarounds in runtime (or inject stuff) if you really need to.
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#168Google is this for almost every internal tool and process. The only difference is most never reach step 5 (quitting), so imagine how toxic that culture is.
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#169i think it happens when there is no hands off approach. the way i heard it before was that some people learn from pressure and others learn from the hands off approach. i know i do a way better job when people tell me what to do without the assumption that i am completely new to something, other people have the opposite learning style, they want the baby steps. but one major issue is when a manager mistakes ones learning style and that just creates frustration for everyone
Re: How learned helplessness happens in engineering teams
#170So true!
Both "This is just how the company is, it won't change" and "We survived thus far, we'll get through" are the unofficial mantras of the company I work for. Even though many in the middle management see the problems, these mantras are repeated whenever one speaks up against silly processes. And boy, do we have some silly processes.
It's not helped by the fact that the second is actually a mantra often quoted as the official motto of the neighboring metropolis, as if resistance to betterment is something to be proud of ("et hät noch immer jot jejange", for those in the know of both German and the dialect).
Though I suppose it might have also been the motto of the dinosaurs before the big impact.
There is "learned helplessness" in a way also in management, because they in turn seem to have learned that raising any issues with the higher management only leads to being branded as, if not a source of discord or trouble, then at the least as someone who requires a higher manager to deal with something, as opposed to those not requiring a higher manager to deal with something. The later clearly being preferred by the upper management.