191–200 of 267 posts
"There’s the office where I asked one day about the fact that I almost never saw two particular people in the same room together. I was told that they had a feud going back a decade, and that things had actually improved – for years, they literally couldn’t be in the same room because one of the two would get too angry and do something regrettable, but things had now cooled to the point where the two could, occasiona…
I can't read this because my ISP's (I assume) scheme of MITMing all http traffic is buggy, and now I can only load things over https. Start using encryption, people. There's no reason not to.
Are you blaming the writer because this page is delivered through regular http?
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> To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. Ultimately what "they're paying you" for is not so specific. Generally, leadership doesn't have the skills to know there is a problem. Even in the cases where the leadership is technically exceptional, there is no way they can consider the myriad technical decisions and how they affect the future of the business. Maybe leadership stil…
> Ultimately what "they're paying you" for is not so specific. I think you'd find in most organizations, roles are well-defined, but not articulated to those assuming those roles, because it helps morale to let employees define themselves, and also keeps them from getting too complacent. A manager's job is not to lead but to manage, i.e. get the greatest possible output from the employee. If you want to know what you…
Whenever I've done something like that in the past, the complaint is always some variant of "I noticed you goofing off".
Historically this was a source of incredible frustration because it basically acknowledged I was undertasked; the complaint would never be some variant of "Why isn't X done yet?"
I suppose that means I had no defined role in the company?
Sometimes a new person comes in saying "WTF WTF WTF Wtf wtf..." because you don't have the messed up practices that they expect.
Ah yes, writing tests, code reviews, and version control can be such a pain, why would you put up with these productivity killers?
Sometimes a new person comes in saying "WTF WTF WTF Wtf wtf..." because you don't have the messed up practices that they expect.
Ah yes, writing tests, code reviews, and version control can be such a pain, why would you put up with these productivity killers?
It's possible for process to serve a purpose, but still not be worth it. (Not going to argue with your specific examples though)
Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business. My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining…
I admit that by straining to fix these hard things, I'm often going outside of the formal role I hold at the company. I'm fine with that. Others may not be at times. For me, the straining is required. We have a cultural goal to "think like an owner" and that is how I typically justify my behavior.
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The unspoken implication here is that 99% reliability is considered bad. This may not be clear if coming from a different field where 99% sounds pretty good.
When you say 99% is bad, are you making a normative or positive statement?
I didn't say that this is a normative viewpoint in engineering or whether I personally agree with it. As you can see from other commenters, many do hold this view. A sometimes opposing philosophy, however, is “release early, release often” which many open source projects adhere to.
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Is the implication that 2 9s are really bad, mediocre, or some other negative judgment in this context? I'm familiar with a lot of places that have trouble with even 1 9 of reliability with lots of capital but terrible culture despite employing lots of operational controls and some best practices that have trouble with one 9, so even 2 9s sounds like a dream sometimes and the way that Dan Luu worded this article make…
How does a place survive being down 37 days per year (one nine)? Cripes!
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Everything is a system—and some systems are markets. A market is also a system. This is why it's important to know how to think in systems, and about psychology, statistics, variation, knowledge and everything else that influences systems—if you want to work in one. There's more to most systems than just incentives. They are a small part of what goes on.
Can you recommend some books on this? I have been trying to learn to think in systems, and find that to be the most useful skill to have.
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Yep. There's a whole philosophy based on the idea that improvement of the organization is everyone's job. It's called Lean, or more simply, continuous improvement or Kaizen.
I hesitated to reply to this because what I'm about to say could be taken as pedantic. However, it is my experience that many people experience a good way of working, apply a label to it and then use that label thinking that it will communicate all of the good things that they intended. This is rarely the case. At some point you see many articles entitled "Why X doesn't work" where they describe a broken version of X…
1) Heat up milk 2) Find something with the consistency of yogurt to put into the milk 3) Wait
Having a living thing there that knows what the final product should be and can stand as an example is largely how we transfer culture.