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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

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Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#282

Post by mannykannot »

jolux wrote: post #151
KMag wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a good deal of responsibility in writing code that is going to run over every single page (and PDF document, MS Word doc, the higher ranked Flash animations, etc.) in the visible web. For my part, I once made a bad assumption about how the Google SAX-style parser handled callbacks for zero-length XHTML start-stop tags. I presumed that would get a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-tag pointe…

What does it mean that you were right to feel embarrassed? You were wrong to make the mistake, sure, but that happens. That’s what a mistake is. It’s not clear to me what shame helps in this instance. If somebody has a pattern of not meeting a quality bar with their code that’s one thing, but otherwise cutting people up for mistakes really seems like bad culture. Aren’t you supposed to practice blameless postmortems…

This may all be a matter of different nuances on words like "embarrassment" and "shame", but personally, I would put higher trust in someone who firstly recognizes that they could have done better and secondly regrets that they did not, and I would prefer to be that way myself, without being rendered ineffective by it.

One can never, however, be sure that someone really feels that way ("The secret to success is sincerity - once you can fake that, you've got it made!") Nevertheless, faking it involves never saying certain things, and that turns out to be hard, so the fallible approach that I aspire to is to assume sincerity unless given evidence to the contrary.

In this view, blameless postmortems are the right way to go, at least up to a point: neither embarrassment nor regret are things that can truly be imposed from outside, and definitely not sincerity.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#283

Post by mattclarkdotnet »

KMag wrote: post #213
quakeguy wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great story nevertheless.

It helped me empathize with young engineers dealing with their first high responsibility bug. About 4 years ago, I was managing a guy right out of school who pushed a minor bug that broke real-time risk calculations for a major multinational financial institution in the middle of the European trading day, prior to the NYC open, and people were yelling over email that they were trading blind. Someone had committed an…

"I reassured the new guy that people were yelling over email because it was important, not because they were mad at him"

This is outstanding advice, and very well put. I shall be borrowing it, thank you!

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#284

Post by roughly »

patneedham wrote: post #102

Discovered by Eliza Callahan triggered by a poem in the middle of her novel. (Friend of a coworker) That poem can be found here: https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ - if viewing on mobile you have to Request Desktop Site for some reason, at least on Android it initially shows up as a Lorem Ipsum page

As arguments for the thesis that the tech world needs to embrace the humanities go, an author discovering a bug in a google product by writing a poem is pretty good, if maybe a bit too on the nose.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#286

Post by interestica »

ayashko wrote: post #238

Reminds me of an old joke; – I bet you a beer you can't make a logical, grammatical sentence with five ands in a row – I used to be a sign writer in a previous life and one of the jobs I had was to repaint the sign hanging over the door to this very pub. Except the publican was adamant that he wanted more space between the words. Where exactly I asked? In between the Pig and and, and and and Whistle he replied.

And this joke reminds me of a Garden-path sentence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#289

Post by runlevel1 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #175
haliskerbas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this story makes me glad I don’t work there for some reason.

Conversely I would prefer to work in a place like that. Professionalism at scale isn’t achievable by tolerating idiotic behaviour and being nice to everyone no matter how dangerously stupid they are being. There is a point where someone has to put their foot down and demand things be done properly, otherwise the inevitable consequence is a giant mess leading to disaster. You might be used to small startup teams with…

There was a time when I would have agreed with that.

What I've learned since then is that, with a healthy company culture, you can give frank feedback -- even about stupid mistakes -- without it being a rebuke.

It's also important that you target the right problem. It's only human for smart people do stupid things sometimes. In the specific DO...OD example, I'd be more interested in how it got through a code review than the mistake itself. (Funny enough, early versions of the C source for Bash itself had macros like that.)

Now, if someone exhibits a pattern of ignoring good, constructive feedback, that's a problem. The folks I've seen like that both gave terrible feedback and took feedback terribly. That's a behavioral problem, and you only get so many chances to correct that before it's time for them to find other employment.

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