Live data from Hacker News

The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

neugierig.org

31–40 of 85 posts

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly agree. Peopleware 1987 [1] > The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book. I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the wor…

What if the company has significant constraints on its financial health?

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book. I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the wor…

What if the company has significant constraints on its financial health?

Then it's all the more important to avoid unnecessary employee turnover.

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#33
Most interesting point to me

> You must often compromise between correctness and convenience or performance and you should be intentional when you choose a point along that continuum. I find some programmers are inflexible when considering this dynamic, where it's somehow obvious that one of those concerns dominates, but in my experience the interplay is pretty subtle; for example, a tool that trades off correctness for convenience might overall produce a more correct ecosystem than a more correct but less convenient alternative, if programmers end up avoiding the latter.

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought of the smoothie blenders first too, but I can't see how they would ever have failed given how great they are. My life has changed since buying the first such blender about 4 months ago

Oh don’t call the Ninja a blender - there is a giant thread on one of the main FB groups. OP is getting ripped

Is there some fun tea here? Ninja themselves describe them as blenders, has the community mythologized them into something else?

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#35

I switched to samurai for the few things I have that still used ninja; it's an improvement in every possible way. But regardless, I think those kinds of build systems are just wrong. What I want from a build system is to hash the content of all the transitive inputs and look up if it exists or not in a registry.

sounds like https://gittup.org/tup/ to me.

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#36

> we talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues. A thousand times this! This puts into words something that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a very long time.

This precisely describes why Google Glass failed.

Elaborate?

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#37

I switched to samurai for the few things I have that still used ninja; it's an improvement in every possible way. But regardless, I think those kinds of build systems are just wrong. What I want from a build system is to hash the content of all the transitive inputs and look up if it exists or not in a registry.

That's how metas buck2 works

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly agree. Peopleware 1987 [1] > The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book. I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the wor…

>Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves

Of course. This maximizes their relative power within the company.

Some executives are focused on the health of a company as a whole but not many. To most of them the pie can be assumed to be a fixed size and their job is to take as much of it as possible.

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law > Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

Source code repos could have USER.md and DEVELOPER.md files to record social context.

But again, that is at best infrastructure documentation, not code. Unless you dilute the term "code" until it loses nearly all utility.

Re: The success and failure of Ninja (2020)

#40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh don’t call the Ninja a blender - there is a giant thread on one of the main FB groups. OP is getting ripped

Is there some fun tea here? Ninja themselves describe them as blenders, has the community mythologized them into something else?

More like an ice shaver that adds air is what the community likes to call it

Because blenders don’t turn things into an ice cream texture

Post reply on HN