Can't believe you could get fired for something like that. Do you work for an American company or something? Jeeze...
Be Kind
441–450 of 458 posts
Re: Be Kind
#442This was so nice to read. I think back to my very first coding internship after my freshman year of college when I messed up big time. I made a bad mistake that ended up forcing my supervisor to put down everything he was working on for a full afternoon and do an emergency fix. I so vividly remember sitting down in his office, trying to just calm down and keep it together. He never got upset or annoyed (at least he n…
when a supervisor gives a freshman work which can mess up erverything it is the supervisor's fault and not the fault of the freshman
Exactly! A sane supervisor should have put a rule that disallows deploying on Fridays. End of story.
Re: Be Kind
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've seen people write things like: if (true == true) Which, if you make that an === in JavaScript, can actually make sense in some situations :)
Can you give an example? I can't think of any situation to literally write if (true === true) rather than just if (true). (If anything.)
Sorry I not only mis-read but mistyped and I can't edit or modify my original post. Please ignore it :(
Re: Be Kind
#444Earlier 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.
Alarm fatigue is indeed an issue -- but if the trader is repeatedly trying to sell for way below market price that often, then perhaps there is a much bigger problem...with the trader.
Re: Be Kind
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know you're probably not implying regression to the mean is causational, but that was my initial reading so I want to clarify for those who may not be familiar with the concept. Regression to the mean is simply that any given datapoint is most likely to be the mean, or close to it. This means that any exceptional data point,up or down, can be expected to be followed up by the mean. The example of this being misinte…
Yeah, I always make an example with coin flips to show how this is true.... lets say heads is success and tails is failure. Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :( Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising.
Except, coins are not humans with emotions, and neither can they dupe probability to improve their outcome. The 50 heads(success) that you left are not going to do any better than the 50 tails you scolded. You are just changing the sample space in a biased fashion to prove your point.
Re: Be Kind
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of what you're saying on a meta-level here. You would basically be telling this guy, "I fucked up, but I'm blaming you for treating me like an adult instead of a child. You screwed up by giving me enough autonomy that I could make a mistake." That might not exactly be a smart career move.. On a more personal level, if someone shows you kindness in the face of a mistake, the last thing you want to do is throw it…
Why not both? Of course you can accept responsibility for this mistake but then suggest creating a testing suite to run commits through before making them live?
Yip, that's exactly what I did today. I made a mistake which borked layout on one page. I thought I'd looked at it, didn't, and it got deployed. I'm now suggesting the company use continuous integration and some automated screenshot type tests for catching these issues.
I hate making mistakes, but if more robust procedures are the result, well, it's an overall win!
Re: Be Kind
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Like it or not, humans are primed to respond to confidence Exactly. My feeling is that while perhaps many of us learned this the hard way, well at least I did--from experience--in hindsight it seems obvious that our emotional impulses and intuitions, while albeit valuable, are not fine-tuned to success in technical careers.
I think intuition and emotional impulses is immensely important for communicating with non-technical stakeholders. They haven't learned the art of emulating a computer so we've got to be a human being. IMHO.
Yea, I agree with that actually.
Re: Be Kind
#448> “It’s okay,” he replied. “We’ve all done it.” He paused for a moment. “But what did you learn?”
Never push changes on a Friday PM. Ever.
Re: Be Kind
#449Right now, this post is 4 votes away from being in the top 10 most popular HN posts of all time.
Re: Be Kind
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was not familiar with this story; that prompted me to research it. I found it interesting that this aviation incident had a positive outcome, in the form of safety innovations: the Hoover Nozzle and the Hoover Ring. Wikipedia states: "A perhaps-undesired recognition is the Hoover Nozzle used on jet fuel pumps. The Hoover Nozzle is designed with a flattened bell shape. The Hoover Nozzle cannot be inserted in the fil…
In general, this design principle is known as poka yoke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke
In terms of physical connectors, I've always referred to this as polarisation. The connector is polarised so that it can only be inserted in one orientation, generally by use of a slot and key.