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Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

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Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#201

Post by ashirviskas »

tom2026hn wrote: post #190
markus_zhang wrote: post #182

The title reminds me of an interesting ancient Chinese anecdote. And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo ). King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que: “Of you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the healing art?” Bian Que replied: “My eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I, Bian Que, am the leas…

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

How many euros or kilograms is it?

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#202

Post by fabianholzer »

sdfsd233fsdf wrote: post #189
fabianholzer wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.

If one of the most successful engineering organizations in history attributes part of its success to capable management, that undermines simplistic narratives where management is inherently the problem and engineers would naturally thrive if left alone. If anything, the Bell Labs example supports the idea that exceptional outcomes require both strong technical talent and strong management working together. Not saying…

Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.

I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.

I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#204

Post by Steve16384 »

coldtea wrote: post #139

Pendatically speaking, people do get credit for fixing problems that never happened. E.g. if the problems are quantifiable and there's a record, like dropping homicides from 100 per year to 20 per year in a city. Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood. For an one-off problem, it depends on how clear the path to the problem is. An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixin…

> An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if the accidents didn't happen.

Not if nobody knew he'd fixed it.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#207

Post by harimau777 »

I had this problem at a previous job. I spent almost all of my time taking care of the behind the scenes administrative work (scheduling meetings, making sure that people had the information they needed to come into the meetings prepared, etc.). However, when performance review came around I was told that the only thing that they cared about was that I hadn't completed many story points because I was too busy keeping things from falling apart.

So I stopped doing all the administrative work and focused on just completing story points. A week or two later my manager asks the team "how come all of our meetings are falling apart now? We get into a meeting and no one knows what's going on."

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#208

Post by forshaper »

menaerus wrote: post #125
pulse7 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry your dad didn't respect your IT work...

If I move out a bit of my circle, where people do all kinds of work, I'd say that there's generally a stigma on the "IT" workers. Moreover the stigma is there even within the IT company/industry itself, where sales, marketing, non-engineering parts of management, and other similar types of supporting roles also look down on the engineering. And this unfortunately includes family members too. I learned that people are…

I do think of all my computer work as predominantly janitorial.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#209

Post by thx67 »

atoav wrote: post #114
antonvs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.

No it does not need to come from the outside. If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding. If you're heroically obscuring the fact that things are falling apart you won't. That means even if you could somehow, heroically fix it, it isn't perceived as such if nobody ever felt the problem and saw you fix it. This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying thin…

The problem is that management witnesses the pain, but the response isn't to adjust behavior, it is then to punish the limb where the pain originated from. The reason that people pull heroics is also because the organization isn't healthy, and cannot reflect on its actions. Papering over organizational flaws is a symptom of a larger, often unseen problem. If it was healthy, someone would have already said, "hey, I think we need to work on this networking component" and it would have been looked at.

Pain propagation, to use the corpus metaphor isn't enough.

Re: Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

#210

Post by sorokod »

markus_zhang wrote: post #182

The title reminds me of an interesting ancient Chinese anecdote. And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo ). King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que: “Of you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the healing art?” Bian Que replied: “My eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I, Bian Que, am the leas…

Can you share the source of the anecdote? I tried to find it in Zhuangzi and was not successful.
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