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Be Kind

briangilham.com

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Re: Be Kind

#251

Post by brazzledazzle »

NoPiece wrote: post #232
brazzledazzle wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't jibe with my experience. As long as the person doesn't evaluate their mistakes in a vacuum they become more careful in general because they learn that things can bite you in the ass in totally unexpected ways. So I'd say it depends on your environment combined with the individual. Someone who is apathetic and/or lacks critical thinking skills will probably learn very little beyond avoiding that specific…

*jibe (jive is a dance, jibe is agree)

Right you are. Thanks, I was able to edit it in time.

Re: Be Kind

#252

Post by MrMullen »

karmajunkie wrote: post #222
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #142

We're an industry filled with people who have social disorders. Some people are just angry little people. Misspell something in a config file and they just ... go ... ballistic... It's not enough to just try and tell these people to be nice. They don't know HOW to be nice. Their brain isn't wired to be nice. Edit: spelling.

I hate to be this guy... but 'ballistic' has two l's.

You're fired.

Re: Be Kind

#253

Post by nathas »

overgard wrote: post #181
scraft wrote: post #109

Nice little read. There is that little answer in the back of my head of: "It is a good question why I caused this problem. It is weird to think there is a competent company that has been around for so many years, yet they have no procedures in place to stop this from happening. You would think that any changes that could cause downtime on a clients website would go through an automatic test suite and only after passi…

Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…

I disagree. If you have something that is of significant value to the company, you need to hedge your risk. Automation is a particular hedge. People fail, and while processes do too, they often fail less.

Would you be comfortable moving something fragile by hand that is worth a lot of money? Maybe. Would you prefer if the fragile item being moved was done with an automated process that was shown to best protect fragile items? I would.

"I'm really sorry I caused that car accident." "That's okay, next time take Driver's Ed and don't drive on sidewalks." "Thanks, I'll make sure to do that... by the way, why can I even drive on the sidewalk in the first place? Why wasn't it required to take Driver's Ed?"

I'm very obviously using hyperbole here, but questioning a process, to me, often shows a level of maturity in engineering. It's not blame-shifting - you clearly still made the mistake - but it's fixing a root cause.

I do think it has to be brought up carefully and with the right tone at the right time though.

Re: Be Kind

#254

Post by SatvikBeri »

tehwalrus wrote: post #217
pfarnsworth wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two schools of thought, especially in stock trading. 1) Reversion to the mean. This is what the above person believes and that this likely won't happen again. 2) Indication of a trend. The pilot is actually incompetent, and this will happen more frequently with this pilot than an average pilot.

Isn't regression to the mean a phenomenon of random variables? Humans aren't perfect improvement machines, but they surely beat a random variable?!

Regression to the mean applies any time a process has high variance. If I have an unusually productive week, odds are the next week will be worse, simply because the previous one was an outlier. But people often make the mistake of noticing week X+1 was much worse than week X, and attributing it to some variable that changed between X and X+1.

Re: Be Kind

#255

Post by smacktoward »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #186
endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it.”

In my experience, while someone might be extra careful not to repeat a mistake that has burned them in the past, making a serious mistake is often a sign that someone is careless, and more likely to make other, different mistakes in the future.

One mistake, even one very serious mistake, means nothing. People are human, even the best of them are going to make mistakes occasionally. Be as careful as you want, it doesn't matter, literally nobody is perfect.

A pattern of making mistakes can tell you somebody is careless, or sloppy, or in over their head. But a single mistake? That's just inevitable.

Re: Be Kind

#256

Post by 77pt77 »

organsnyder wrote: post #210
77pt77 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those people are disproportionately represented in positions of authority and you really can't cut them off without effectively becoming a pariah.

In my experience, most of the time those people in positions of authority aren't actually malicious. They're either misinformed (the higher you get, the less you're able to have both depth and breadth of knowledge), or they have competing priorities.

What you describe certainly happens and is probably the most common scenario. Many times there is no malice, just some very worldly constraints that result in undesired consequences.

However, rising through the ranks of social structures is facilitated by machiavellianism and this results in an over representation of the kind of people I was talking about the higher up you go. It's a numbers game.

This isn't even very controversial and academics studying psychopathy will even acknowledge it.

Re: Be Kind

#257

Post by slgeorge »

nathas wrote: post #253
overgard wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…

I disagree. If you have something that is of significant value to the company, you need to hedge your risk. Automation is a particular hedge. People fail, and while processes do too, they often fail less. Would you be comfortable moving something fragile by hand that is worth a lot of money? Maybe. Would you prefer if the fragile item being moved was done with an automated process that was shown to best protect fragi…

I think you've hit the nail on the head at the end with "right tone at the right time" - the right time is almost certainly not when one has screwed up.

Re: Be Kind

#258

Post by ceronman »

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #243

> Jr Dev > Access to production > With clients that need the service running 24/7 Oh boy... is he used to work on facebook? when i was a jr dev, i didn't have access to production everything went to source control and then tested by my project technical leader and qa. This ensure that i won't do this things since my changes getting reviewed and tested plus we have reproducible builds that anyone can verify and contin…

I disagree. I work for a big company with a big product that shouldn't have a single minute of downtime. We let new devs deploy to production from day 1. We have ways of mitigating the risks, like a very sophisticated monitoring and the ability to rollback changes in seconds. Yes we sometimes have outages, and we lose money. But in our experience, empowering developers is much more effective than handcuffing them. They learn to be careful and freedom allows for creativity to flourish resulting in amazing solutions.

Re: Be Kind

#259

Post by huangc10 »

endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it.”

Link to the Bob Hoover story: http://www.squawkpoint.com/2014/01/criticism/
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