Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#21

Post by quietbritishjim »

I think we can be a bit less cynical about this behaviour, at least in some cases.

Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes is always going to notice a bunch of potential changes, which would improve things from their subjective point of view. But humans are notoriously bad at absolute scales (see Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman) so it's hard for us to decide "I can see a bunch of issues but they're all below the threshold for changing". The top of the scale is always what is most important out whatever issues are left. Adding the duck reshapes the scale so all those other things seem (correctly) trivial in comparison.

To put it another way, if the deadline is tight and the program kept crashing, maybe they wouldn't have even asked to remove the duck! The scale would have changed again, and the bit with the duck on it would have been compressed below the threshold.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#23

Post by dirtybirdnj »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #18
raziel2p wrote: post #14

Why is the PM the meddling one here, and not the artist who (presumably un-prompted) added a duck to the game? Seems clear to me that the artist was the one who wanted to leave their mark in this story. Are some people allowed to and others not?

Unfortunately I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Some people ARE allowed while others are not. Sadly it seems the most creative or involved people (devs, artists) are not while a PM is.

Class and status are one hell of a drug

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#24

Post by mejutoco »

resonious wrote: post #9
preinheimer wrote: post #7

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about. So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they w…

It's bad but I consider doing this for code review sometimes.

This reminds me...many graphic designers knows to have a bad version of a design. What they do not expect is the customer picking that one. It explains some campaigns though

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#26

Post by crispyambulance »

smeej wrote: post #4

I tend to interpret this as a sure sign of a manager who secretly knows they're useless. If you're the manager, your job isn't to do my work. Your job is to optimize my (and the rest of the team's) ability to do our own work. If I've missed something that should be part of a procedure, that should be in a checklist I should have reviewed before submitting my work. You shouldn't have to tell me to tweak it. If I'm han…

Things change all the time. People, including managers, are human and specs aren't something that always can be "carved in stone" in advance and carried out to perfection.

There certainly are pathological situations where people really do need to leave a mark and that's why "the duck" technique that Rachel described works.

This pops up in presentations too. Sometimes you know in advance that your presentation is going to have an audience with one or more "well, actually..." types who will try to poke holes a little too aggressively in your argument.

One technique for handling this is to deliberately leave out some persnickety detail in your deck, but cover it exhaustively in an auxiliary slide that you don't show unless someone points out the omission. It works great. Every. Time.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#27

Post by mannykannot »

notahacker wrote: post #11
scrapheap wrote: post #2

Quite often the person believes they are helping with their suggestions (or at least that's what I believe when I'm the one doing the suggesting). But there is certainly better and worse ways to make those sort of suggestions. On the other hand, I quite often don't bother rounding the corners of boxes when working on a web UI until one of the last things. That way anyone who just wants to make their mark can just sug…

That works up until the point someone says they love the squareness of the boxes ;-)

You win either way, so long as you don't care which way the decision goes.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#28

Post by brightball »

preinheimer wrote: post #7

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about. So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they w…

One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a telco's marketing department. He would get everything working and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one section that looked out of place.

Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good, let's just change that red line there. Thanks!"

I asked him why he did that and he said that if he didn't give them something obvious to change, they would find something that was working that didn't need to be changed.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#29

Post by faet »

preinheimer wrote: post #7

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about. So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they w…

This is how it is in some motorsports series as well. I had a teacher who was a mechanic for a racing team. They'd leave something 'big' broken for tech so that the people would find it, have them fix it. He said they'd miss a bunch of smaller stuff, but would feel accomplished for finding the 'big' error.

Re: Project managers, ducks, and dogs marking territory (2013)

#30

Post by sokoloff »

brightball wrote: post #28
preinheimer wrote: post #7

I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the people doing the safety exam -had- to find something. Your car could have been fresh from the mechanic, they’d find something to complain about. So, starting about 6 weeks out from their next safety, if something went wrong but the car was still drivable, they w…

One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a telco's marketing department. He would get everything working and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one section that looked out of place. Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good, let's just change that…

The 2007-02-02 Dilbert applies: https://assets.amuniversal.com/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71...
Post reply on HN