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You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

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Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#31

Post by 8ytecoder »

pjc50 wrote: post #16
fragsworth wrote: post #6

I'll take a stab at explaining what happened here: "No swap in production" probably stemmed from someone who worked on the servers, and that person discovered they were swapping too much, which would eventually lead to hard drive decay. And, maybe for budget reasons or whatever, they decided to make it a policy to disable swap, rather than increase RAM or change the underlying software that caused the servers to use…

Swap causes not disk decay but performance decay; the system gets unamanageably slow and would have been better off with a clean crash and failover.

Only if there's thrashing. It’s prohibitively more expensive to build a machine that has enough memory for way more than peak usage than to have some swap that can handle some level of overflow pages.

Like everything swap has to be monitored and there’s no need To disable it entirely

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#32

Post by drewg123 »

A powerful "no man" can be a valuable asset sometimes.

I was involved in the design of an ASIC. This was going to be used by people from all different areas of the company, and they all had various demands. Most had never worked on a chip before, and didn't realize the cost of what they were asking for. The easy thing to do would have been to ensure that every requested feature was added But that would have burned area, power, and huge amounts of design and verification time.

Luckily we had a senior guy who had the clout to say "no". Over and over again, he would tell people how much things would cost in terms of money and time, and ask if the features they wanted were worth that much. Or he'd point out that what they wanted could be done with firmware plus existing features. Overall, he probably saved millions of dollars and caused the project to be delivered on time.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#33

Post by d2mw »

incomplete wrote: post #24

i was at this company when this happened, and oh boy, EVERYONE who knew the person in question and the 'new' kernel feature got some amazing, long-lasting and well deserved laughs. btw, it was /proc/ , not /dev :)

I didn't recognize the story until you corrected the path. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242831

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#34

Post by hrktb »

beiller wrote: post #20

Trust but verify. I'd bet if the author went to the original source, the "no man" himself, they may find that there is actually no such policy! Just a mishearing of a conversation parroted by "wrong people".

“Trust but verify” litteraly meant “Don’t trust” (as in “don’t trust the Russians” in context). Was it the nuance you intended ?

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#35

Post by wfbarks »

hrktb wrote: post #19

I don’t get it. 1 - there is a Mr.No guy but, the author only knows him by reputation 2 - there is a technical problem that seems to revolve around memory 3 - the author has an idea of a solution, she actually tries as people don’t believe her 4 - her solution works, but she is told the “No” guy said “no swap” once a long time ago Her reaction: “Did I care what he supposedly said? No.” Why doesn’t she go talk to him…

These where my thoughts, "No" guy could have a good reason for no swap. no swap might have been a fix for some other issue OP is unaware of, which OP has now reverted. Don't know until you ask...

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#36

Post by NateEag »

jacquesm wrote: post #10
scarejunba wrote: post #5

The funny thing is we're all making trade-offs at various times. So there will be people who will point at someone else and say "He's a no-man" and at other points they will be the "no-man". I remember saying "no" a lot at some points of my life, and I think it was because I hadn't yet learned to say "the cost of that is this and in my opinion it isn't worth it" but there are still times I am speaking to people where…

Have Slack threads risen to the level of documentation now?

When trying to start a culture of documentation, permalinks to Slack conversations where people made decisions are often helpful.

Think of them as real-time meeting minutes and it may be easier to swallow.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#37

Post by vxNsr »

hrktb wrote: post #19

I don’t get it. 1 - there is a Mr.No guy but, the author only knows him by reputation 2 - there is a technical problem that seems to revolve around memory 3 - the author has an idea of a solution, she actually tries as people don’t believe her 4 - her solution works, but she is told the “No” guy said “no swap” once a long time ago Her reaction: “Did I care what he supposedly said? No.” Why doesn’t she go talk to him…

you caught like half the male pronouns, there are still a bunch left, it actually makes it more confusing.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#38

Post by dijit »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #11

One of the easiest strategies to protect your reputation in life and business is to never venture to say yes (because if it fails you are on the hook), and to let your discussion always revolve around an idea's failings, never its strengths. It gives an appearance of expertise and command, but risks little, and thus often leads to promotion. But I personally find it poisonous to the enterprise's progress: Even the be…

Er. This is awful advice.

You’re also on the hook for impeding the organisation.

I’m a “no” guy. My boss is a pure yes man.

I don’t say no to impede progress. I say no to avoid overworking my team which would reduce the quality of our work.

I say no, because it changes the scope of work in progress, and that requires sufficient justification because it means either throwing work away (which is both demoralising and wasteful), potentially increasing time to delivery or creates technical debt in droves.

I say “no” so that people don’t make their own standards (like not following logging patterns, or metric naming conventions) which would cause all kinds of gunk in the infrastructure.

It’s not about following a strict process. Although that can be important for streamlining workflow through an understaffed team like mine, it’s about ensuring that the quality of what we do is not at risk.

Quality is our only currency, without it everything suffers.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#39

Post by scarejunba »

jacquesm wrote: post #10
scarejunba wrote: post #5

The funny thing is we're all making trade-offs at various times. So there will be people who will point at someone else and say "He's a no-man" and at other points they will be the "no-man". I remember saying "no" a lot at some points of my life, and I think it was because I hadn't yet learned to say "the cost of that is this and in my opinion it isn't worth it" but there are still times I am speaking to people where…

Have Slack threads risen to the level of documentation now?

A principle I have is that I lower the barrier for others to contribute the things I want to see more of. Rather than holding a Slack thread up as the apotheosis of documentation, I recognize that I am more likely to receive wisdom if I allow for a Slack thread to be sufficient. It's just a permanent link to a conversation.

This is reinforced by the additional fact that the people with the most I have to learn from are the people with the least time to teach me. So I minimize the effort I require of them to give me their best.

For instance, if I had a chance to ask Feynman stuff, I would happily accept answers in txtspeak with emojis and broken grammar. Sort of a personal Postel principle.

Re: You've heard of “yes men”. Now learn about “no men” (2011)

#40

Post by scarejunba »

vxNsr wrote: post #37
hrktb wrote: post #19

I don’t get it. 1 - there is a Mr.No guy but, the author only knows him by reputation 2 - there is a technical problem that seems to revolve around memory 3 - the author has an idea of a solution, she actually tries as people don’t believe her 4 - her solution works, but she is told the “No” guy said “no swap” once a long time ago Her reaction: “Did I care what he supposedly said? No.” Why doesn’t she go talk to him…

you caught like half the male pronouns, there are still a bunch left, it actually makes it more confusing.

It makes it sort of like the sci-fi book Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. You have no idea what the gender of the protagonist is. Perhaps future gender-neutral speech will sound like this instead of choosing a third pronoun.
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