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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#161

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

geenew wrote: post #130
aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

I once encountered a situation with a very expensive field laser. At one point, measurements started showing an increasing amount of offset. Over a period of days, the error became increasingly, comically bad, until finally the system refused to boot. A technician was called, and after hearing about the behaviour, the first request was that a photo of the laser light exit port be taken. It was obvious why it wouldn’t…

>They really should have had someone to say ‘you can’t ship that’ when the topic of glue to hold mirrors came up.

I work in product at a hardware company and have a lot of domain experience which came from spending years in the (literal) field. There's been many times where I write a product spec and the engineers are incredulous. "Really? It gets THAT hot?" or "Do we really need to provide a bonding/grounding lug on the case?"

It's not uncommon to find engineering teams with deep domain experience in one area, but completely lacking in others. Ignoring domain experience, there should have been rigorous product testing during design that would have weeded out the glue issue.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#162

Post by Jtsummers »

MikePlacid wrote: post #158
Jtsummers wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along with this "how long to spin up the new hire" issue, one of my first (if not the first) questions when trying to help people improve their processes related to software is: > If the user/client asks you to make a small but not trivial change, how long would it take to update and deploy the program? I have had answers ranging from "A couple hours" to "A year" (yes, they were serious). Most were in the 1-3 month r…

Not sure how speed of the change is related to batches. The “batch” is related to “due this week”, there never was a single item in this list. “Speed” is related to “due which week”, that depends mostly on the priority of the change, not on how easy it is. Upd. And “change menu items order, fast” is a sign of a problem. We found Mac Cube in ski vacation rental home once. It ran MacOS 10.2 or something. All the menu i…

By running the exercise with a small change the constraints and behavior of the rest of the process get emphasized. As an example, in one team their test process was entirely manual and took a month. They ran that entire test suite for every release, whether the release should have affected the requirements being tested or not. Why? Mostly because they didn't know what changes in the release would affect what requirements, but that was another problem. This did encourage larger batch sizes though because if you have that large cost in your process and the cost is fixed regardless of batch size (100 changes or 1, you spend a month testing) you might as well batch more changes into the release. Having more releases means you incur this large fixed cost more often and overall reduces your throughput.

And I don't think I understand your update to your comment or you don't understand the point of that example from mine. It was illustrating the submission topic: normalization of deviance. Sure, you should think about where things should be but if a customer comes in and says, "Swap these two items" and you can't provide a working version with that single change for months then things have gone off the rails somewhere. I put it in quotes to reflect a statement like what I have heard from those teams I worked with. To them a long effort for a trivial change is normal, when it should be considered deviance.

EDIT: effect->affect. Always trips me up.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#163

Post by XorNot »

KMag wrote: post #140
XorNot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could look at it a different way: a more accurate nuke means a nuke that's targeted at military facilities and not sized 10x larger and aimed at "everything around that city over there". If it was ever used, that work saves lives.

More importantly, I think more accurate nukes along with good satellite multispectral and signals intelligence means that top generals carrying out orders for nuclear first strikes can be more certain that they're signing their own death warrants. Hopefully this results in any leader ordering a nuclear first strike getting deposed by military coup rather than starting a nuclear war.

People are willing to die for causes all the time. The idea that a bunch of people would not take an action because it might kill them, particularly in the military, is pretty naive.

The history of nuclear brinksmanship is built on almost the exact opposite problem: people who are completely willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause and their government and who believe fully that the cost would be worth it and the decision would be correct.

At the expense of one's own life is one of the easiest sacrifices to make, and people who believe it are dangerous because they tend to volunteer a bunch of others to do so alongside them.

Nuclear command and control isn't about keeping any one person alive, it's very much about keeping the system functional so the deterrent is preserved. There's no way, within it, to actually ensure any level of personal survival - but the various advocates for first strikes at different points in history have never been concerned with that. They want their legacy, they want the problem solved "forever".

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#164

Post by mixmastamyk »

ryandrake wrote: post #80
mixmastamyk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too hard to read. See newspapers. Multiple windows are a thing.

So, leave the choice to the user. If I want to read text in a small column, I can easily resize my window. Don't try to force one way.

No one reads well with 200 characters per line. Been demonstrated that they read a lot slower. Even if line height has been increased to alleviate, which it probably hasn't. I'd recommend multiple columns before super-wide text blocks.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#165

Post by mixmastamyk »

AlbertCory wrote: post #96
mixmastamyk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk about killing a fly with a sledgehammer. Simply needs one or two lines of css, max-width and possibly font-size.

I had two words there: "organize" and "format." This addresses only the latter.

The piece has several headings. Don't believe a blog site is going to magically add more to organize it.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#166

Post by Zagill »

jacquesm wrote: post #157
aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

One of the key questions in my due diligence practice is whether people are allowed to 'be negative' and to literally stop the line to avoid shipping a defective product. This one question tends to separate out a very large fraction of companies that take unacceptable risks and allows the ones that don't to be justifiably proud of their attitude towards risk. These are not trivial things either, medical devices and s…

Jidoka[1] is a key feature of Toyota's manufacturing process that emphasizes detecting defects before they make it out the door and empowering workers to stop the line and get to the root of the problem. It's weird that this isn't a no-brainer for most orgs but I guess there's enough profit incentive in shipping faster at the cost of quality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomation

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#167

Post by sokoloff »

lmm wrote: post #149
kurthr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also why things in aviation are so fixed and difficult to change. Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked... how about 40, 50? When will it break? Well, when someone develops an easy to build, easy to fly, inexpensive experimental craft and zillions of people do it all at once (hasn't happened yet). One of the more interesting things I've found is that a huge number (easily a majority) of in…

> Who do you want flying when things go bad? People who have spent many hours with things about to go bad (military, emergency/fire, sail plane pilots) who have experience dealing with it. Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks. Maybe. Or maybe you're better off with freshly trained people who still remember exactly what to do in all the failure scenarios. Certainly I've gen…

Until a quite advanced age, I’d much rather be a passenger in a car driven by a driver with years of experience rather than a fresh license.

The stats seem to bear that out as well.

Commercial study: https://www.fleetowner.com/perspectives/ideaxchange/article/...

Teen study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12643948/

In aviation, there’s a “killing zone” from 50-350 flight hours (with 40 being the typical legal minimum hours for licensing and 60+ being more typical).

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#168

Post by MichaelZuo »

jacquesm wrote: post #157
aj7 wrote: post #107

“Let's say you notice that your company has a problem that I've heard people at most companies complain about: people get promoted for heroism and putting out fires, not for preventing fires.” My first day at work at big-laser-company. Manufacturing engineer for a laser (then) so complex, it required a PhD to solve problems to get units out the door. The product was a ring laser. What that means is that the laser bea…

One of the key questions in my due diligence practice is whether people are allowed to 'be negative' and to literally stop the line to avoid shipping a defective product. This one question tends to separate out a very large fraction of companies that take unacceptable risks and allows the ones that don't to be justifiably proud of their attitude towards risk. These are not trivial things either, medical devices and s…

There definitely is a lot of pretend, or alleged, authority floating around in a large organization. But when it comes to brass tacks, the number of folks who really can do something and have it accepted is quite small.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#169

Post by MikePlacid »

ctroein89 wrote: post #139
justin_oaks wrote: post #46

I welcome others to share stories of the normalization of deviance in their companies. One company I worked had no unit tests, no infrastructure as code, and no build server. This held strong for a while until enough developers implemented some unit tests, infrastructure as code (e.g. terraform), and a build server as skunkworks projects. Eventually management tolerated them, but never endorsed them. Some teams at th…

> and no build server Personal experience is that a build server normalizes deviance. "But it works on the build server" we used to say, as, with time, it become harder and harder to build locally. "Just fix your environment!" we used to say, when it was the build system that was actually at fault. "It's all so fragile, just copy what we've done before!" we then said, repeating the mistakes that made the build system…

> “But it works on the build server" we used to say, as, with time, it become harder and harder to build locally

This got me puzzled for a couple of minutes. Yeah, that “WTF, WTF” moment. Then I realized that our build “server” comprised of 12 different platforms (luckily reduced to just 6 in the later years), so to pass a build in production was a bit harder than to build locally.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#170

Post by jacquesm »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #168
jacquesm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the key questions in my due diligence practice is whether people are allowed to 'be negative' and to literally stop the line to avoid shipping a defective product. This one question tends to separate out a very large fraction of companies that take unacceptable risks and allows the ones that don't to be justifiably proud of their attitude towards risk. These are not trivial things either, medical devices and s…

There definitely is a lot of pretend, or alleged, authority floating around in a large organization. But when it comes to brass tacks, the number of folks who really can do something and have it accepted is quite small.

In my experience this very much depends on two thing: the industry and upper management.

Some industries have a really lax attitude and in quite a few cases upper management basically makes it impossible for people to speak up.

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