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Normalization of Deviance (2015)

danluu.com

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Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#31

Post by aliqot »

chaps wrote: post #26
aliqot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jeez thats a rough spot to be in. did you stick around to fix it or just get the hell out of dodge after that?

I did what I could with a handful of selenium scripts, then hit a road block because we didn't have ssh access to a chunk of the autoscaling hosts. Gave up after that, told the customer rep to tell them we can't do it, and gave my two week notice about a month later.

Ouch, that has to be rough to endure. I'm glad you seem to be in a better place now. Good on you for doing the right thing and getting the hell out of there when your options ran out.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#32

Post by kurthr »

stevehawk wrote: post #8

This is a big term in aviation, because in most cases in order for something catastrophic to happen it requires a lot of things to have failed. And one way to ensure that enough things fail is to start deviating from your maintenance, inspections, or general responsibilities. Related: the swiss cheese models.

It's also why things in aviation are so fixed and difficult to change. Not having any new civil aviation planes for 30 years worked... how about 40, 50? When will it break? Well, when someone develops an easy to build, easy to fly, inexpensive experimental craft and zillions of people do it all at once (hasn't happened yet).

One of the more interesting things I've found is that a huge number (easily a majority) of instructors are recently trained flyers, because there is a pipeline to train them and they're cheaper than using experienced pilots (esp for multi-engine and more complex airplanes). They also know all the ins-outs of the training and rule books (with recent changes) so they know how to pass all the tests and how to teach that. Sooooo you have a bunch of inexperienced pilots teaching all the new pilots... there's likely a failure there, but it hasn't reared its head. We still have a lot of ex-military folks around who didn't learn that way.

Who do you want flying when things go bad? People who have spent many hours with things about to go bad (military, emergency/fire, sail plane pilots) who have experience dealing with it. Those people can also be fun/terrifying to fly with, because they will take risks.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#33

Post by sebstefan »

xnorswap wrote: post #25
AlbertCory wrote: post #13

This guy needs to organize & format his writing better, since he does have really interesting things to say.

If you don't have a reader view in your browser, just paste this into your global CSS: p { line-height: 1.7; max-width: 60em; font-size: 1.2em; margin-left: 5em; } It pretty much fixes the default readability which is essentially zero on this site otherwise.

I don't like fucking with the default CSS, my alternative is this bookmark that injects Javascript in the page and temporarily fixes the formatting at one click of a button

    javascript:(function(){ var bod = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0]; bod.style.margin = "40px auto"; bod.style.maxWidth = "40vw"; bod.style.lineHeight = "1.6"; bod.style.fontSize = "18px"; bod.style.color = "#444"; bod.style.padding = "0 10px"; })();
And for a dark mode:

    javascript:(function(){ var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body"); var html = document.getElementsByTagName("html"); var img = document.getElementsByTagName("img"); body[0].style.background = "#131313"; body[0].style.opacity = "1.0"; html[0].style.filter = "brightness(115%) contrast(95%) invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)"; img[0].style.filter = "contrast(95%) invert(1)"; })();

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#34

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

kerblang wrote: post #27

Great stuff - I think this goes in the "required reading" list. The tech industry tends to revolve around "I'm a super-rational robotic genius" thinking that can't accept the existence of its own irrational tendencies, to the point that it becomes ridiculous.

The standard "Required reading" text on the subject is "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" By Sidney Dekker

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#35

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I like the bit about Let's look at how the first one of these, “pay attention to weak signals”, interacts with a single example, the “WTF WTF WTF” a new person gives off when the join the company. and kinda wonder if a company that prioritized not getting this reaction from new hires might find it is the most impactful thing they can do in terms of culture.

In my experience, you cannot change an organization's culture with rules, mission statements, listing values, or giving speeches. They only way is to take down the old culture bearers. Some of them may be managers, but more often they are employees who have gained some organizational power. You'll often find them at the center of sticky organizational spider webs with approval processes such as purchasing and service administrators.

To change the culture, these people have to go. Firing them may not be feasible, but there are other options. Dethroning them in the form of a promotion or even just physically moving them can be effective. When people don't have to jump through their hoops anymore, they lose their organizational power.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

kerblang wrote: post #27

Great stuff - I think this goes in the "required reading" list. The tech industry tends to revolve around "I'm a super-rational robotic genius" thinking that can't accept the existence of its own irrational tendencies, to the point that it becomes ridiculous.

[deleted]

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#37

Post by Sesse__ »

xnorswap wrote: post #25
AlbertCory wrote: post #13

This guy needs to organize & format his writing better, since he does have really interesting things to say.

If you don't have a reader view in your browser, just paste this into your global CSS: p { line-height: 1.7; max-width: 60em; font-size: 1.2em; margin-left: 5em; } It pretty much fixes the default readability which is essentially zero on this site otherwise.

Dan Luu talks a bit about this here: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1115707741102727168

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#38

Post by jkaptur »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I like the bit about Let's look at how the first one of these, “pay attention to weak signals”, interacts with a single example, the “WTF WTF WTF” a new person gives off when the join the company. and kinda wonder if a company that prioritized not getting this reaction from new hires might find it is the most impactful thing they can do in terms of culture.

Just to give a different, concrete, perspective (and push a hot button HN issue), I've spent a fair amount of time working on extremely large web applications, and by far the #1 "WTF WTF WTF" thing that new hires say is "what do you mean you aren't using $TODAYS_HOT_JS_FRAMEWORK??"

Once you get away from "should we use version control" and into actually difficult software engineering questions, it's not clear how to balance a fresh perspective vs. an experienced (normalized? tainted?) view. I wish the article went into this more.

Like, how does the new hire (or anyone else) know the difference between "learning the complexity of the new system" and "internalizing/normalizing the deviance of this culture"?

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#39

Post by justin_oaks »

chaps wrote: post #30
a4isms wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Making good decisions, therefore, requires understanding past decisions. Without knowing how things came to be, it’s easy to make things worse." — https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence

I was once told this after raising the issue that "hey maybe an API that responds with root ssh passwords is a bad idea, and our clients are going to be pissed once they find out." And.. I was right. So often, citing Chesterton's fence is significantly more naive than what it attempts to criticize.

I agree. Chesterton's fence doesn't mean that if you don't know why the fence is there, don't ever move it, under any conditions. It means try to find out why it's there before moving it.

In many cases in my career, I've seen code that doesn't make sense or seems like a bad idea. The person who could explain why it's there has long left the company. Am I afraid and leave the screwy stuff there, while citing Chesteron's fence? Hell no. I'll change it to do the right thing. This results in either exposing the reason why it's there, or showing that it really was unnecessary/bad. If something breaks from the change then it's good that I can finally document what wasn't documented before. So either way it's a win.

Re: Normalization of Deviance (2015)

#40

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I like the bit about Let's look at how the first one of these, “pay attention to weak signals”, interacts with a single example, the “WTF WTF WTF” a new person gives off when the join the company. and kinda wonder if a company that prioritized not getting this reaction from new hires might find it is the most impactful thing they can do in terms of culture.

This is something we actively try to take advantage of at my company - we know that we've grown comfortable with architecture that may not make a lot of intuitive sense, so when we have new people join we try to make a list of confusing concepts so we can try to clean them up. In the ideal case the new person is able to do the cleanup, so we get a more intuitive design and they learn the surrounding architecture more along the way
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