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Doing the thing is doing the thing

softwaredesign.ing

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Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#191

Post by josephg »

gonzalohm wrote: post #178
josephg wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what it looks like when trust has broken down at a company. Management don't trust engineers when they say "this needs more time". And engineers don't trust management with the truth (it kinda works - we really could ship it now if we wanted to). Remarkably common, but not inevitable. Thankfully there's plenty of workplaces which don't look like this. And yeah, lying is certainly one way to get work done in a…

I think the problem is that in the current system, the blame is always on the engineer. If you ship something early and it didn't work, then it's your fault because you didn't QA it enough. If you don't ship it in time it's also your fault This is bound to happen with any company that needs to deliver to clients. Sales are incentivized to sell at all cost, even if the product is not there yet.

“The current system” isn’t a thing across our whole industry. You’re speaking about some specific places you've worked.

Personally I’ve never felt blamed for bugs that made it into production. I’ve felt responsible for sure, but I’ve never been blamed by others in the business. And I have seen sales people utterly chewed out for selling features we haven’t implemented without asking engineering. It all really depends on where you work, and what the culture is like.

If you hate it there, you don’t have to stay. Not every job will be like that.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#192

Post by bodge5000 »

air7 wrote: post #174
bodge5000 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems like it'd only get more visible as it gets more normal, or at least more predictable. Remember back in the early 2000's when people would photoshop one animals head onto another and trick people into thinking "science has created a new animal". That obviously doesn't work anymore because we know thats possible, even relatively trivial, with photoshop. I imagine the same will happen here, as AI writing…

we didn't really survive photoshop. The obviously fake ones were easy to detect, and the less obvious ones took some some sleuthing to detect. But the good fakes totally fly under the radar. You literally have no idea how much of the images you see are doctored well because you can't tell. Same for LLMs in the near future (or perhaps already). What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man fr…

I'd say the fact that you know theres some photoshop jobs you can't detect is proof enough that we're surviving it. It's not necessarily that we can identify it with 100% accuracy, but that we consider it a possibility with every image we see online

> What will we do when we'll realize we have no way of distinguishing man from bot on the internet?

The idea is this is a completely different scenario if we're aware of this being a potential problem versus not being at all aware of it. Maybe we won't be able to tell 100% of the time, but its something which we'll consider.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#193

Post by stared »

Writing a litany about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Posting on HN about doing the thing is not doing the thing. Commenting about doing the thing is not doing the thing.

Guilty as charged, going back to work.

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#194

Post by theshrike79 »

8note wrote: post #67
black_puppydog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly." Got me through many a rough spot.

it fits well enough into another frame - make it work, then make it pretty, then make it fast if youre worried about doing it well, youre a step or two ahead of where you need to be

This has been my motto for decades, dunno where I picked it up frst.

I think I've reached the "make it fast" bit in my career twice. Most projects are considered as ready after "make it work" =)

Re: Doing the thing is doing the thing

#195

Post by theshrike79 »

jgeada wrote: post #61

At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society": They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it. It was never…

This is an excellent piece about how doing something is better than just talking about it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
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