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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]

#221

Post by thx67 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #42
macrocosmos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a trap?

The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse. You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement to be monotonic and costless.

When you are at capacity and in a degraded state, you have no additional headroom to get out of that state. Why wounds won't heal, or the poor stay poor.

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

#222

Post by teddyh »

cameronh90 wrote: post #183

As Futurama said, when you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.

They stole that from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 17:

  When the Master governs, the people
  are hardly aware that he exists.
  Next best is a leader who is loved.
  Next, one who is feared.
  The worst is one who is despised.

  If you don’t trust the people,
  you make them untrustworthy.

  The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
  When his work is done,
  the people say, “Amazing:
  we did it, all by ourselves!”
— https://ttc.tasuki.org/section:17>

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

#223

Post by thx67 »

ekjhgkejhgk wrote: post #162
arkensaw wrote: post #161

I feel obliged to point out Stanslav Petrov, who absolutely got credit for fixing a problem that never happened. Granted it's a very extreme case.

Credit only in fame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#Aftermath > Petrov underwent intense questioning by his superiors about his judgment. Initially, he was praised for his decision.[2] Colonel-general Yuri Votintsev, the then-commander of the Soviet Air Defense's Missile Defense Units, who was the first to hear Petrov's report of the incident (and the first to reveal it to the public in the 1990s), st…

His page links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls which is a harrowing thing to read. We keep rolling the dice with no changes to the game.

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

#224

Post by bruce511 »

qurren wrote: post #199
bruce511 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway. The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job hunting. But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place. In that case the game is different. In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important, it's neces…

> I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place I worked at Amazon, previously. > Management needs visibility. I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing the state of things rather than waiting for people to deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility" in s…

I don't disagree. However few managers are this proactive. If you have such a manager, then fantastic.

If not then making yourself more visible becomes necessary. Because you can be sure (at least some of) your co-workers are doing so.

Or, you know, stand on principle, then come here to complain about injustice as things work out badly. :)

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

#225

Post by vitus »

sorokod wrote: post #210
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.

Best I can tell, it's originally from Heguanzi: https://ctext.org/he-guan-zi/shi-xian

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

#226

Post by pugworthy »

This brings to mind Neil Rickert's "The Parable of the Two Programmers", which was published in the ACM SIG Software Engineering newsletter, January 1985.

https://dl.acm.org/action/showFmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F1012443 for the original, or https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro... for a reprint.

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

#227

Post by jt2190 »

friendzis wrote: post #128
atoav wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not. More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time. > If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that…

How did you make the illogical leap to “could not”?

Repeatedly requesting time/budget to fix an ongoing issue is a requirement of any half-decent manager. If they’re reporting issues then just smiling blankly when asked “what can we do about it?” they’ve failed their basic job duty.

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

#228

Post by nomel »

timmg wrote: post #9

There are a lot of things like this. My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course." Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

Yeap. Managers perceive complexity by how personally confused they are. I'm late in my career, and I'm realizing I wasted so many man years trying to make code clean, user friendly, and maintainable, when that code was never read by another person again and forgotten 15 minutes after it was released, then used for years. This is why I think AI is coming for our jobs much sooner than many people think: clean code, separation of concerns, maintainability, etc, all the things we spend the most time on, have never actually been valued. "Good enough" is fine, and keeps management happy. And, if something does pop up, AI can patch it, even if with spaghetti, just like fucking that ass at work.

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

#229

Post by [deleted] »

npunt wrote: post #24
timmg wrote: post #9

There are a lot of things like this. My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course." Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others,…

[deleted]

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

#230

Post by nomel »

npunt wrote: post #24
timmg wrote: post #9

There are a lot of things like this. My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course." Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others,…

Definitely. Previously, intent and effort were required to increase complexity. Now intent and effort are required to prevent complexity*!

But also, what a beautiful problem to have!

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