How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#211

Post by calinet6 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:43 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #149

vinceguidry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current situation and seeing things again with clear eyes. I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope…

Not sure why you are getting so many replies disagreeing with you. Narrowly-defined roles are indeed the norm, even in the tech world. When I was an "individual contributor" I'd get frustrated with Worst Practices all the time, but was told that I was hired to write code not to change our infrastructure or suggest different product features or improve our testing practices--MANAGEMENT makes those decisions. But even…

I really disagree, strongly. It takes time and perseverance, but you can spread better ways of working.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#212

Post by waybull » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:51 AM UTC

bewuethr wrote: post #178

lnanek2 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, scientifically, one queue for all registers is the superior solution. It reduces wait times for customers in general vs. one queue for each register (where one of the lines might get stuck for a long time). That's why you find banks and other places are all setup to have one queue used by all the clerks. The only real problem with H&M is that they haven't put stuff in the way of people forming multiple line…

It doesn't reduce average wait time, but the variance in wait times.

One line typically reduces the average wait time as well. In the multi-queue scenario, it's common for a register to go unused while a queue remains at another register.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#213

Post by waybull » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 2:57 AM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #130

pbreit wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you have to compromise much. If you have any self-worth, you'll strive for improvement. You don't have even have to that careful about rubbing folks the wrong way. You're not going to get fired or anything.

>You're not going to get fired or anything. You won't get fired, but what might happen is that you get a reputation for being "that guy". The "guy who's always complaining about unit tests". Or, "the guy who emphasizes process of 'agility'". What then happens is that the moment you speak up, management tunes out. They know what you're going to say. They know what you're asking for. And they've already told you no. At…

That depends entirely on how you do it.

If you're upset that there's lousy test coverage, and you respond by complaining, that's not useful. If you respond by making the test suite run faster; creating better mocks; writing docs; making the test results more visible; teaching others how to write (better) tests... that's a different story.

The trouble comes when you think that pointing to a problem is, in and of itself, valuable. We're all surrounded by problems; pointing out one that we likely know about probably isn't useful.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#214

Post by ajdlinux » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 3:08 AM UTC

ianamartin wrote: post #188

vinceguidry wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I do want to note that in general these things do have real concrete negative impacts on the bottomline of the organization. Oh absolutely. But your duty to that organization is to raise these issues to the person best-equipped to see the bigger picture, and to do your best to convince him it's a real problem. Once you've done that, your work is done , you have just done more to help your organization than…

I completely disagree with this. To expand a little, I don't think the point of having a positive effect on the WTF parts of an organization has anything to do with my effect relative to other employees. If I see a WTF security or ops practice, I don't sleep better at night by telling myself, "Welp, I noticed it and said something to someone, and that's a lot more than most people do." Maybe I think of my job too bro…

Whether or not it's strictly within my job description, I think dealing with things like security vulnerabilities and poor operational practices definitely falls within my ethical duties as someone who claims to be a professional.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#215

Post by auganov » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

The most unsettling thing is how much I love reading anecdotes like that - they make you feel so much better about "messed up" things you do yourself.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#216

Post by santaclause33 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 3:34 AM UTC

gertef wrote: post #180

mattkevan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like when there's two cash machines, with a long queue at the first but no-one at the second. You can see people looking at it, wondering whether it's worth the humiliation of finding it's broken and having to go to the back of the queue, or the joy of finding it is working and getting one over everyone else. Often nobody cracks.

Why would you have to the back of the queue after reconning the other queue? What kind of jerks do you queue with?

My experience is more with the OPs. Leave the line, lose your spot.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#217

Post by charleslmunger » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:14 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #39

draw_down wrote: post #24

This post seems so good and so self-evidently true that I'm surprised at the amount of pushback it's getting here. Not sure what else to say about it. Well, I'll say this- the "@flaky" thing is pretty mind-blowing. In my own company I have noticed many engineers have a disturbing level of comfort with deciding something is a "mystery". There are no mysteries in what we do. The test fails because something is fucked u…

Yeah...I mostly have experience only running test suites for popular libraries and for my own software...but the existence of this library is a massive WTF...such that had I read its official introductory post, I would have thought it to be really good satire: https://www.box.com/blog/introducing-flaky-a-nose-test-plugi... Can someone describe a real life production scenario in which this flaky behavior is desirable?…

Th nuance of flakiness (if you work at a very large company with one continuous build system and one big repository for everyone) is that in order to not break dependent teams with your checkins, you run all their tests before checkin. Sometimes this catches major, subtle issues - out of a run with a million+ test targets, one test fails and it reveals a critical security bug in a widely used open source library. But most of the time, large numbers of poorly written (or neglected) tests fail, and it's not because of your change. The important thing is to show a distinction in the UI between a flaky test and a passing test, so that people don't look at a wall of green and see success, and push broken code to production.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#218

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:17 AM UTC

klenwell wrote: post #126

mattkevan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit like when there's two cash machines, with a long queue at the first but no-one at the second. You can see people looking at it, wondering whether it's worth the humiliation of finding it's broken and having to go to the back of the queue, or the joy of finding it is working and getting one over everyone else. Often nobody cracks.

I actually come across this scenario quite often in retail outlets with poorly designed queue layouts (e.g. an H&M with with 2-4 registers behind a long counter and a single ad-hoc queue lined up in front of one of them). My reasoning is a little different (and a little more charitable I suppose in its generalization about human nature): I don't want to go step in front of the register with no one waiting in it becau…

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#219

Post by kyllo » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:21 AM UTC

JimboOmega wrote: post #193

vinceguidry wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> If you want to know what your defined role is, a simple way to do so is to simply stop doing your job and seeing what people complain about first. 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 varian…

Pretty much. And there definitely are jobs like that out there. I once had a job where literally no one would have complained if I didn't do any work except for sitting at my desk, replying to e-mails, and attending meetings (which I don't consider "real" work). Because I was part of a management training program, I was not expected to produce any output, I was just "there to learn." In reality, that meant I was a professional internet surfer and no one cared. I was miserable and left that job as soon as I could afford to.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#220

Post by kyllo » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:29 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #149

vinceguidry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you seriously believe that all (or most) companies disallow anyone not in leadership to improve things, I'd consider getting out of your current situation and seeing things again with clear eyes. I've been around a bunch, including the US Air Force, and I can confidently tell you that heavily hierarchical organizational culture is the norm, individuals contributors who want to have effects beyond their job scope…

Not sure why you are getting so many replies disagreeing with you. Narrowly-defined roles are indeed the norm, even in the tech world. When I was an "individual contributor" I'd get frustrated with Worst Practices all the time, but was told that I was hired to write code not to change our infrastructure or suggest different product features or improve our testing practices--MANAGEMENT makes those decisions. But even…

There may be awesome companies out there where anyone is empowered to just go fix some practice that's not productive, no matter where they are in the org chart, but those companies are few and far between. I'd love to see one.

One thing I would consider doing, if I ever start my own company or rise high enough up in someone else's company to implement this, is to give every single employee some sort of discretionary budget to spend on things that make the workplace better. The more experienced and trusted you are, the bigger of a budget you get. I think this would go a long way in fighting the learned helplessness dynamic.