How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal • Hacker News Board

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#221

Post by kyllo » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:34 AM UTC

mmatants wrote: post #144

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…

I recall reading somewhere that while military organizations are very much synonymous with hierarchy, they have historically experienced a lot of pressure to flatten and decentralize, at least as far as field command goes. Napoleon's success was attributed to smaller units that responded to feedback more quickly. Unfortunately I can't find that article. However, this is not to say that in regular administration there…

The US Marines are often cited in management literature as an example of an organization where the leadership communicates high-level intent and purpose to achieve strategic alignment, and then totally decentralizes tactical decisionmaking to the people doing the actual work in the field. The stereotype that they are just all about top-down decisionmaking and following orders, is false. They recognize that individuals need to be able to make decisions on the fly in order to react to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#222

Post by kyllo » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:36 AM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #142

karlkatzke wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left it open-ended, actually. I talked to the CDO and explained why I was leaving. He agreed with the decision and thanked me for being brave enough to stand up and say it. It ended up being three weeks before we agreed that I'd successfully handed off everything. No bad feelings either way -- I'd joined the company because they had said that they wanted to 'grow up,' but that was a feeling percolating up from belo…

Wow have I ever been there, done that at a startup you've heard of. Line level employees hated the endless firefighting; the ceo/cto didn't give a shit and stymied any change. My solution was to forfeit any ops duty at all. I told my boss she had two choices: I didn't work on ops or I didn't work there at all.

So what did your boss say to that? Guessing the latter, because it sounds like you don't work there anymore...

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#223

Post by kyllo » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:39 AM UTC

cubano wrote: post #156

satai wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You brought completely irrelevant point.

No I didn't...it's only irrelevant to you because you are not trying to understand what I'm saying.

If you just dropped the Einstein part, it would be a perfectly fine comment.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#224

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 4:46 AM UTC

mattkevan wrote: post #90

danso wrote: post #10

I immediately thought of the "5 monkeys and a ladder" psychology study, in which the first monkey attempts to climb the ladder to get a banana and all of the monkeys are sprayed with water. Then one of the monkeys is replaced with a newcomer, who then tries to climb the ladder, but this time, the remaining original monkeys attack it. And so the replacing of the monkeys continues, until none of the monkeys knows what…

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.

[deleted]

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#225

Post by wildmusings » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 5:00 AM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #164

klenwell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I presume that one of the problems with one queue for all registers is that people will perceive it as a longer line. A five person line at a particular register doesn't seem as bad as a fifty person line for all ten registers.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#226

Post by nostrademons » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 5:21 AM UTC

lnanek2 wrote: post #164

klenwell wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

That works only if all registers are being utilized to pull people off the front of the queue. The grandparent poster described a situation where everybody queues in front of one register while the other registers sit idle, which isn't optimal for anyone.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#227

Post by something_23423 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 5:46 AM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #108

calinet6 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. There's a whole philosophy based on the idea that improvement of the organization is everyone's job. It's called Lean, or more simply, continuous improvement or Kaizen.

I hesitated to reply to this because what I'm about to say could be taken as pedantic. However, it is my experience that many people experience a good way of working, apply a label to it and then use that label thinking that it will communicate all of the good things that they intended. This is rarely the case. At some point you see many articles entitled "Why X doesn't work" where they describe a broken version of X…

Except this big catch is that employees are compensated for the improvements they bring about. That basically never happens in a typical software company. Maybe if you keep bringing in important changes someone will notice and maybe you'll get stock options or you'll be promote to management

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#228

Post by something_23423 » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 5:54 AM UTC

shalmanese wrote: post #47

vinceguidry wrote: post #15

Most of what the author is complaining about boils down to business needs being more important than the needs of the engineering team. To be blunt, they're paying you to do a job, not to make the organization better. That's what they pay the leadership for. You want to be part of the leadership, work your way through the ranks or start your own business. My life got much, much easier once I learned to stop straining…

This is exactly a perfect example of WTF worthy behavior being treated as totally normal; that it's encoded that there's "leadership" and "not leadership" as binary job distinctions with distinct responsibilities. I've been in both types of cultures and, by far the healthier culture was the one in which "making the organization better" was treated as everyone's responsibility. I've seen very junior engineers drive qu…

This is half true. People will go out of their way to make the organization better if it make their jobs easier (ex: switching to more modern easy-to-work with technology). But if for instance the project is going in a wrong direction, most of the time you have no good reason to fight to change things (and yes, it's fight b/c often it's about changing opinions and demonstrating repeatedly that things needs to be done different). So sure, do your duty and voice your concerns but at the end of the day just go with the way the boss decides. This is called delegation of responsibility and something a lot of people don't grasp. You need to cover you ass to stay sane.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#229

Post by warfangle » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 6:03 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…

Single queue multiple registers work really well. Especially for high volume (see: whole foods).

Teaching customers how to use them, on the other hand.....

And for some situations, like a movie theater box office, a single long line actually drives people away (on non-blockbuster-opening-nights) because it looks like a big crowd, compared to two small lines. Even if it means they'd get through it faster. .... at least, before the age where everyone just buys their ticket on fandango.

Re: How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal

#230

Post by vinceguidry » Thu, Dec 31, 2015, 6:10 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…

> the complaint is always some variant of "I noticed you goofing off".

OK, there's a political status-quo you have to learn how to internalize. If you work at the front desk, you can fuck around on the computer, but you can't take a book out and read. One looks like work, the other looks like fucking around. You can't make your organization look bad. The perceptions are more important than the substance. If you can't get the perceptions right then you were never going to make it in corporate America, and should probably stick to contracting.

So the way to actually do this is, to look like you're working, but actually be producing nothing. When they complain, you can say you were busy on X, where X is some obviously unimportant meaningless detail. That forces your boss to clarify what he expects you to be working on.

That your boss never asks you about specific tasks means that your defined role is to be a repository of knowledge and not a cog in a machine. This is a good thing, knowledge workers can bullshit their way to perks that the rank and file could only dream of. My current job is just such a thing.

The key to this is understanding that nobody actually knows what you do. Management can only guilt you into being productive, they have no way of actually knowing if you are being productive or not. Perception is reality and you control the face you put out to the organization.