Don't Feed the Thought Leaders

Post by spyckie2 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:03 AM UTC

iainmerrick wrote: post #171

spyckie2 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did notice the irony myself :) The article talks about contingent advice being better than universal advice only in stage 3. If you're not then universal advice is helpful. I think that holds true for most people and most subjects, including myself. Originally, I thought the article did a great job describing a common scenario that occurs usually in decision making and I wanted to describe my intuition on why I thi…

That makes sense! I just realised my reply may have come across as mean-spirited rather than the light joke I intended. Sorry about that.

Post by fridif » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #177

anchpop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, the features are really must-haves though. Let’s say it’s march 2020 and your boss wants you to design a mass-market covid vaccine. You have three requirements: it needs to be safe for human use, it needs to be effective at preventing covid, and it needs to be possible to manufacture. If any one of these is missing, your design is useless. I think a similar dynamic is visible in many software projects.

A manager once brought up "there are three levers - scope, time (deadline), money (people)", and while it's probably not revolutionary, it did stick with me. Add more "must have" scope, and something else has to give.

Post by tonyedgecombe » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:23 AM UTC

Nition wrote: post #20

peter_l_downs wrote: post #4

Found this to be a straightforward and interesting article. Not sure I've ever seen someone connect Tetlock's research to engineering planning before; I certainly hadn't made the connection myself. I also appreciated the tip that instead of saying no to something, you can just add it to a "future work" section of lower-priority but definitely-still-very-important-i-promise-really-i-mean-it tasks and everyone will end…

From How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk (1980): > My husband and I took Jason and his older sister, Leslie, to the Museum of Natural History. We really enjoyed it, and the kids were just great. Only on the way out we had to pass a gift shop. Jason, our four-year-old, went wild over the souvenirs. Most of the stuff was overpriced, but we finally bought him a little set of rocks. Then he started…

Post by Sammi » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:25 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #155

anw wrote: post #31

It's cathartic to read other people who have to go through this. I'm fighting red tape for my team as we build out a dashboard. Outlook is packed with 1–2 hour meetings for the next 3 months where so far I'm: * being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) * being asked to integrate with various analytics platforms so we can alert some poor schmuck at 3 AM in case the API goes…

being asked to load test our system to make sure it can handle the load (of 3 people?) The problematic load in a dashboard isn't users; it's querying the data sources to get up to date information. For example, if you're running a query to aggregate a bunch of things with lots of joins and that query takes 1.5s to run but your dashboard tries to run it every second so it can be 'real time' then you're in for a bad ti…

Post by onorton » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #117

runawaybottle wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll add to the list: - Ceremonial unit tests for every little thing. The whole system is buggy as hell and we don’t have any confidence that the unit tests are truly covering critical parts of the app. But alas, test coverage, the god damn Pope that can never be bemoaned. - I’m not making this one up: A/B testing for an internal enterprise app.

Test coverage is almost the perfect illustration of Goodhart’s law. Good programming practices do result in high test coverage, coverage is very easy to measure, but very easy to fake with useless “tests”. So, when the coverage is measured, the coverage goes up, but stops being meaningful.