Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

web.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 274 posts

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

#251

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

nrightnour wrote: post #68
qurren wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them Speaking from experience, this does nothing. If you're at a company that is okay with average performers, then absolutely, 100%, fix all the bugs in advance, make the system rock solid and stable, prevent downtime, be a good engineer. If on the other hand if you're at a company where 10% of people must get stack ranked and PIP, or at a company…

I'm sorry about your experience. Personally, I only rehire people from projects that went smoothly, not ones where I had to make the urgent phone call. Teams that "just work" are highly valued. They clear up my attention for other things.

Did you manage/hire in a stack rank environment?

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

#252

Post by eldenbishop »

keyle wrote: post #17

I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves. Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on. It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between…

Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything. Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their budgets frozen and lost headcount.

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

#253

Post by _caw »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #241
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…

> And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals recently ( https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo ). the article is from June 2024. this is "recently"?

Yes? Toyota has been producing vehicles since the 30s, so two years ago is quite recent within context.

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

#254

Post by SteveGerencser »

atoav wrote: post #122
SteveGerencser wrote: post #101

I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted, according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system collapsed.…

On your dad: "This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what they are worth, this is the way you raised me." I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or you don't bother them and get someone else.

I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make sure that they are charging what they are really worth.

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

#255

Post by smolder »

Yeah, I have fixed issues that could have potentially destroyed the company I was working at. There was an instance of a lazily written script which just took user input for a file open. It could read sensitive files on the system because of lazy development. The other devs praised me for fixing it, but I didn't get any recognition comparable to the losses our company could have had if it got exploited.

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

#256

Post by marcus_holmes »

rmunn wrote: post #86
marcus_holmes wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my first thought too. I've met a few people who assert that Y2K was a complete waste of money. I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; every…

I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can remember the code 25+ years later, that is).

I only worked with the team making changes to the billing system (and even then, I only maintained a database of code modules, who worked on them, and what changes had been made - this was before git and we did version control painfully). As you can imagine, the billing system was definitely not going to survive the date suddenly being 99 years older than it was last month. So I don't really know why the rest of the system would fail.

But the project management team were extremely careful about only changing parts of the system that needed to be changed. Partly so that the scope was contained and second-order effects limited, and partly because the people making the changes were being paid vast sums to do this, and any reduction in work was saving real money. So when they say that it would all have stopped if the work wasn't done, I believe them ;)

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

#257

Post by balex »

order-matters wrote: post #173
friendzis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

IT doesnt control the funding so at that point its not an issue of awareness but a management decision to live with this problem and focus funding elsewhere more often than not, many things in the business are on fire and underfunded at the same time. you can get recognition for your work without the problem being permanently solved the right way, and it may not result in more funding but peopel will think of you for…

It comes back to communication. If management acknowledges the issue but redirects budget elsewhere due to priorities, it's legit. Communicating it in a way IT personnel understand and accept isn't necessarily easy. Sometimes there's also incentive for management to avoid it altogether (we need to focus elsewhere and this could burn you out, but you're an acceptable loss).

That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever. Preferably quantified without drowning them in numbers or fear mongering. That's what pain is all about.

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

#258

Post by dilyevsky »

Tsarp wrote: post #102

Ian Rush said it best: "It's best being a striker. Miss five, score the winner, you're a hero. The goalkeeper plays a blinder, lets one in, and he's a villain." Every place I've worked rewards the firefighter over the person who made sure nothing ever caught fire. And the worst part is the math is obvious to everyone except the people who set the incentives.

I dont think this comparison really works. Firefighter would be goalie or a defender and like you said in sports they are less appreciated/compensated for a simple reason - usually they don’t bring in views. There are exceptions ofc like Pippen or Seaman

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

#259

Post by oenton »

projektfu wrote: post #243
thx67 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where the industry made and continues to make mistakes wrt autonomous driving. They should be able to quantitatively say how many crashes were reduced, avoided and spotted. The autonomous safety system should be running all the time and it should detect not only issues with primary vehicle but it should also catalog issues it sees in other vehicles in its vicinity. We shouldn't have gotten AD before we got au…

My car (Honda Prologue) is a little bit of a nervous Nellie, warning me to brake when someone is turning out of my lane, but it has definitely noticed developing situations many times before I have.

I’m curious, what’s an example of a developing situation it detected for you? I ask because after car pooling with a friend in their Tesla a few times I can confidently say I would never trust what Tesla calls FSD. Forget developing situations, there were some close calls with what’s immediately in front of it. Think- about to miss a left turn at 40mph or drive into construction cones that are blocking a lane. I think I’d prefer basic driver assistance over that.

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

#260

Post by thelastgallon »

Doing nothing at work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442880

The first comment is spot on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496420: Time and time again at many companies, including well-reputed ones, I have seen that preventing issues gets you no recognition, but building a giant pile of kindling and then putting out the inevitable fire will get you recognition twice. Even in "good" orgs.

Post reply on HN