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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#201

Post by quickthrower2 »

> It's technically possible to use @flaky for that, but in practice it's used to re-run the test multiple times and reports a pass if any of the runs pass

This is useful and fine. Someone wrote a test and it now hits a race condition or something and occasionally fails. Let’s assume we are very confident it is problem with the test not the product.

Choices:

Spend a sprint trying to fix it right now regardless of priority.

Turn it off and lose that coverage.

Buy some time.

In this context it makes sense. As long as their is a procedure to address these in some sane timeframe.

Maybe that is an example of normalization of deviance. But I think if it is discusses and trade offs thought through it is an OK thing to do at times. Remember most development is not green field. You inherit a system when you start a job.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#202

Post by colomon »

blep_ wrote: post #175
908B64B197 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by far the #1 "WTF WTF WTF" thing that new hires say is "what do you mean you aren't using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK??" To that speaks of the caliber of programmers hired. If all they have seen is $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK and wrote nothing but a web app using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK they might not grasp the fundamentals that would make then realize that frameworks are just abstractions (and not that different from…

I do not understand how teams work without source control. I don't mean that (only) in the "WTF are you doing, I don't understand why you would do that" colloquial sense. I literally cannot conceive how they work. Do people just... change files and then email the whole file to the other developers and hope nobody else was working on that file? Do they at least have patches ?

First professional software development I did, we didn't even have hard drives or networking. Luckily I was the only developer and it wasn't a huge problem.

First place I worked with other people, we at least had hard drives. I don't think we had networking on the machines or version control. For sure there was only one or two machines in the office that could reach the Internet. Mostly only one person could work on a file at a time.

When we did get more employees, a LAN, and version control a few years on, the mid-1990s Microsoft version control software was such a piece of junk it mostly amounted to a formal digital system specifying who the one person who could work on a given file was...

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#203

Post by sokoloff »

lmm wrote: post #147
a4isms wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is being right about wanting to make a change a refutation of the idea that knowing why people made a decision in the past is an excellent idea? Nothing about Chesterton's Fence asserts that people in the past always made good decisions, nor does it assert that perhaps what was a good decision then is a bad decision today. It simply asserts that understanding why a thing is the way it is is valuable when making a…

> Nothing about Chesterton's Fence asserts that people in the past always made good decisions, nor does it assert that perhaps what was a good decision then is a bad decision today. > It simply asserts that understanding why a thing is the way it is is valuable when making a decision to change it. The second assertion is implicitly an assertion that decisions made in the past are, if not always good, at least good en…

It seems more strange to conclude that the person with the new idea to tear down the fence is so frequently a better thinker than not only the original builders of the fence but also the other people who came along and didn’t tear down that useless fence.

Yes, that is sometimes the case, but not often enough in my estimation to skip the step of trying to understand why that fence is there.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#204

Post by aj7 »

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…

Heh, heh. They ignored my input and kept shipping. Then the customers began calling…

Meanwhile our major competitor cleverly placed their rotating element in such a position that the beam retraced itself through the rotating element, thereby substantially cancelling this effect.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#205

Post by aj7 »

bartread wrote: post #171
Zagill wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, it's worked really well for them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic... . I worked for a company that swallowed the (so-called) Toyota schtick hook, line, and sinker. About 14 years ago I tolerated some Toyota UK fossil coming in and berating me, in front of my entire team, for being a crap project manager, in spite of I was the most reliable and accurate product manager said (very succ…

Toyotas DO break less. But their designs are stodgy, very slowly updated, and generally draw premium prices. So customers keep flashier makes in business.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#206

Post by aj7 »

pm_me_your_quan wrote: post #134
geenew wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This exact problem happened with an optic in my lab in graduate school. For two years the senior grad student and postdoc blamed each other over the entire apparatus becoming misaligned every couple of days. (It was a really toxic environment.) Eventually, they both left, I was the only one there, and it still became misaligned. In one day I tracked it down to a prism from Thorlabs whose glue had gone bad positioned…

Later in my career, I worked for a company whose principal technical strength was that they knew how to glue optics together in such a way that they NEVER moved, either thermally, or from shock. Detachment? The optic would break in an area besides the glue joint first. And the solution had little to do with the nature of which glue, which however was also optimized. These assemblies were flown in space, landed on the moon, and were in all U.S attack helicopters.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#207

Post by analog31 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #191
analog31 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't dispute this, but at the same time, the cars from Toyota and Honda during the 1980s were vastly higher quality than their American and European counterparts. This could have contributed to the desire to emulate TPS.

Could it be an example of... well not survivorship bias, but, TPS gave them a competitive advantage in the 80's, and since then, other car companies have adopted it or something similar and upped their game, normalizing it to the point where people don't care about it anymore? That is, once something is normalized you don't notice it anymore. Like how people that saw the 'rona epidemic was under control (ish) thought…

I do think that people have much higher expectations today. Getting an engine rebuilt is mostly no longer a thing. The US mostly caught up, then Europe.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#208

Post by jacquesm »

aj7 wrote: post #204
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…

Heh, heh. They ignored my input and kept shipping. Then the customers began calling… Meanwhile our major competitor cleverly placed their rotating element in such a position that the beam retraced itself through the rotating element, thereby substantially cancelling this effect.

Oh I totally misread that! From your story it seemed to me that they fixed it. Ok, that is less nice then.

I've played around with some - at the time - fairly high powered lasers and have extreme respect for them, the number of near accidents with those things was large enough that I learned to triple check everything and check for stray reflections at reduced power and the cleanliness of all optics before going all in. That saved me more times than I care to remember and is a nice reminder of how finicky a powerful beam of light can be. It doesn't take a whole lot to get a sizeable fraction of your beam ending up in places where you really don't want it to be. But they're lots of fun, even if they are dangerous :)

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#209

Post by jacquesm »

hef19898 wrote: post #199
jacquesm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as something becomes a religion it loses most of its value. To me the 'Toyota way' was more of an illustration than an exact guideline to follow and I've found this to be true for most of these things that tend to become a religion. Scrum, TDD etc all have this potential to become fodder for consultants that essentially sell a dream that they can not deliver on. But that doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of t…

Form over substance. Toyota, and other Japanese companies, are living the substance of Lean and TPS. Most other companies implement the form and hope they magically get where Toyota is without any additional effort. Same goes for Agile and any other management "philosophy".

Yes, it's the essence of cargo culting. The tech world is also full of this stuff. The number of small companies that I've seen that implement the Spotify development team structure is pretty tragic.

People are always looking for silver bullets and the industry is rife with examples of this kind of thing.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#210

Post by jacquesm »

analog31 wrote: post #207
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be an example of... well not survivorship bias, but, TPS gave them a competitive advantage in the 80's, and since then, other car companies have adopted it or something similar and upped their game, normalizing it to the point where people don't care about it anymore? That is, once something is normalized you don't notice it anymore. Like how people that saw the 'rona epidemic was under control (ish) thought…

I do think that people have much higher expectations today. Getting an engine rebuilt is mostly no longer a thing. The US mostly caught up, then Europe.

That depends on the car brand. Mercedes' don't require engine rebuilds because the engines outlast the body they are in. Most cheaper brands don't require engine rebuilds because it isn't economical to do so, by the time the car clocks over 250K its book value is way higher than an engine rebuild.

But for classic sports cars they're fairly normal, those engines were not made to last forever, tend to be fairly high power for their displacement and the book value of the cars is high enough that rebuilding an engine can make sense.

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