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Be Kind

briangilham.com

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Re: Be Kind

#371

Post by gorbachev »

nodesocket wrote: post #322

I was just thinking about this today. Why is it that software engineers have a supreme mind set... "Oh you don't know that?" "Oh you don't know about that tool?" "Oh you use PHP?" We categorize our peers into two buckets. One with whom you respect, and unfortunately the other as newbies, rookies, not worthy of our time and energy. Listen, I am completely guilty of this behavior myself. Howerver, after reflecting I am…

That sort of dismissive, arrogant behavior is my number one red flag during interviews whether I'm the one interviewing a candidate or I'm being interviewed.

The only time I would allow myself to react that way, and even that's a stretch, is if I was interviewing someone who claimed to have worked with something for several years, hands-on, and would've indicated to be a guru level expert on whatever it is, and then over the course of the interview couldn't answer even basic questions. You've just flat out lied to me and my team in order to waste everyone's time in an interview.

Re: Be Kind

#372

Post by lewisl9029 »

This reminds me of one of my favorite blog posts: https://circleci.com/blog/kindness-is-underrated/

> The choice to be kind can be hard, especially when you’re frustrated or when, thanks to your gifts, you know that someone has made the sort of error you could easily have avoided. It’s easier to be direct; to not concern yourself too heavily with the emotions of others; to want to be unequivocal in your rejection.

Being kind is hard, and being an asshole is easy. People have a natural tendency gravitate towards the easy choice, the path of least resistance. Making the more difficult choice to be kind takes time, effort, and lots of empathy, but I firmly believe what you get in return is worth all that.

By being kind, you help create a more trusting, inclusive, and generally more pleasant atmosphere for you and your team to work and grow in. People also tend to respond to kindness in kind (bad pun intended, sorry!), and kind people tend to prefer working with other kind people, so in many ways kindness literally begets more kindness. Being an asshole also comes with similar feedback loops, but I know which one I want working for my team!

Disclaimer: I'm working at CircleCI now. :)

Re: Be Kind

#373

Post by StanislavPetrov »

ninjakeyboard wrote: post #313

As software engineers: As beginners, we're over-confident in our ability, even if we actually suck and make lots of mistakes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect The opposite seems to become true - experienced engineers (who have learned from their mistakes) seem to be extra paranoid. I've seen also older engineers that seem to be confident still, talk a bit game, but they just never learned.…

>It seems paranoia is a great indicator of experience, and over-confidence/arrogance is an excellent indicator of a lack of learning.

This is certainly true, and it isn't limited to the field of engineering.

Re: Be Kind

#374

Post by racl101 »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #169
endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it.”

There are two schools of thought, especially in stock trading. 1) Reversion to the mean. This is what the above person believes and that this likely won't happen again. 2) Indication of a trend. The pilot is actually incompetent, and this will happen more frequently with this pilot than an average pilot.

Totally ruined that warm feeling I got from the anecdote with your damn logic.

Re: Be Kind

#375

Post by josinalvo »

tehwalrus wrote: post #217
pfarnsworth wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two schools of thought, especially in stock trading. 1) Reversion to the mean. This is what the above person believes and that this likely won't happen again. 2) Indication of a trend. The pilot is actually incompetent, and this will happen more frequently with this pilot than an average pilot.

Isn't regression to the mean a phenomenon of random variables? Humans aren't perfect improvement machines, but they surely beat a random variable?!

In my model, humans have an average performance, that increases over time (unless something terrible happens) and a random component, that makes performance fluctuate around the average.

The question is: is the day-to-day random variation much bigger than the day-to-day average increase? If so, regression towards the mean makes total sense.

Re: Be Kind

#376

Post by eridius »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #290
qb45 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original wording is ambiguous. I too read it as if OP had some issues with people coming from there.

I like figuring out how to look at a sentence how others do (like those images that can be viewed two ways). But I'm having trouble with this one. Amazon devs being generally bad would not be suitable for use as a defense ("in my defense") for his behavior. I think it would require the assumption that he thinks that Amazon devs are generally bad as well as the assumption that he thinks that laughing at them is someth…

I too originally read it as saying that it was expected to be bad coming from Amazon. And the "in my defense" part is that, if you know the coder is from Amazon, then you understand why the code might actually be truly bad enough to elicit a chuckle (as opposed to just chuckling at normal bad code). In other words, it's like saying "in my defense, it was super bad code".

That said, I think the interpretation that "he had 3 years experience at a big company, he should have been better" is probably the correct one.

Re: Be Kind

#377

Post by tomelders »

hodgesrm wrote: post #324
endymi0n wrote: post #25

When he returned to the air field, Bob Hoover walked over to the man who had nearly caused his death and, according to the California Fullerton News-Tribune, said: “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it.”

It's probably not unrelated that American air travel is very safe because there's a no-blame, learn-from-the-issue attitude to problems. More generally it is very difficult to build highly reliable systems of any kind without having a very open culture where you focus on exposing problems and fixing them rather than blaming the message.

I'm reminded of the time Tony Blair visited Silicon Valley to figure out how to replicate it back home. He was at a round table with tech royalty (Gates, The Sun guy, Schmidt etc etc). Steve Jobs was there too.

Everyone was chipping in with their theories about why the U.S and Silicon Valley were so good at what they do when Jobs lost his patience and butted in in true Jobsian fashion.

"Listen! Take a look around this table. Everyone here has a massive failure in their past. Big, epic failures. In the US, we think thats a good thing. In the UK you think it's a bad thing. Thats it."

Or soemthing like that, you get the idea.

Anyway, i've always liked that outlook regardless of wether it's true or not.

Re: Be Kind

#379

Post by laughinghan »

Karunamon wrote: post #318
barsonme wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point--I remember even the online game "Runescape" had a warning that would pop up if you tried to sell an item worth X for a very low price. It would seem to me (somebody who knows squat about stock trading) that a warning screen would be much more beneficial for stock trading software than it is for an online video game.

You'd think that, but then what happens is users get used to the warnings coming up and consciously/unconsciously adjust to click by it without reading . I'd imagine in the case of the stock trader, where quick reaction is valued, he'd have quickly entered whatever key combo is necessary to dismiss it the warning and made the same mistake.

Only if the warnings come up too often. I imagine it should be quite possible to define criteria that discriminate selling shares at a price of 0.0000016 yen from normal prices, by comparing with the market price, or the range of prices ever seen by the software, for example.

Alarm fatigue is an important design consideration, but not a reason to not put warnings at all (given that this isn't amenable to an "Undo" button, which is preferable when possible).

Re: Be Kind

#380

Post by [deleted] »

scraft wrote: post #109

Nice little read. There is that little answer in the back of my head of: "It is a good question why I caused this problem. It is weird to think there is a competent company that has been around for so many years, yet they have no procedures in place to stop this from happening. You would think that any changes that could cause downtime on a clients website would go through an automatic test suite and only after passi…

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