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Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

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Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#51

Post by foobarian »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #9
squidgyhead wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write code and also cycle. I built a bike shed in my back yard. It has become quite difficult to search for advice on how to actually build a bike shed.

Enlighten us! What differentiates a good shed from a bike shed?

That's actually a great point. If this community keeps claiming building a bike shed is trivial, surely we can expect some good ideas. My acceptance criteria would include a solution for water damage, and anchoring - based on previous failed attempts to do that task :-)

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#52

Post by bluGill »

bee_rider wrote: post #26
YZF wrote: post #16

Reminds me of a story a friend related a long time ago about how to manage bosses. That probably applies to bike sheds. The general idea is to introduce a glaring mistake into any proposal you make. Then the boss (or whoever feels like bikeshedding) can "catch" that mistake upon which you congratulate them on their infinite wisdom, fix the mistake, and the project can move along. So to avoid the bikeshed color discus…

Do people actually do this? It seems silly and childish. Although I’ve never had a boss that needed to find an error.

Some people do. It is silly and childish. However they do find some good things to speak up about once in awhile and they are least are not shy about those things. What we need though are people who will speak up about important things but have the gut so keep quiet otherwise - very few of those exist.

It is my firm belief that it isn't likely to find a the flaws in anything important (except for the obvious flaws intentionally left that other posters have mentioned) in the scope of a meeting. Once in a while you will by chance, but even if there is a flaw it needs some to look and think. People who think out loud often drive the meeting in the direction they are thinking and if there happens to be something in that direction they will find it sooner - but they miss the other directions others would have gone thinking in because they directed the thoughts of everyone.

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#53

Post by bluGill »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #50
edgineer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to a mistake, it could be any other detail that you know would be disagreed with. Comedy sketch writers would write a throwaway that was too off the wall to air, then include it in their proposal among others to make sure their darlings made it through. I'm also reminded of the story of the Tetris contract in which a revision of the contract had an important change of a few words, and also an increase…

> It doesn't have to a mistake, it could be any other detail that you know would be disagreed with. A friend's father who was an architect used to do that all the time. He'd submit a drawing that definitely wouldn't pass planning regulations, then go for a meeting with the planning officer and say "Right well how about we swap the swimming pool I am allowed to have, for the dormer windows that I'm not allowed to have…

One more reason to opposed planning departments - too often they are focused on the wrong things. They need to ensure the fire department can rescue people if there is a fire. If my house has a dormer - that should be a first amendment free speech issue they have no interest in (assuming it is otherwise safe). However the looks are easy for someone to verify, while the important things need an engineer to spend time.

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#54

Post by bluGill »

kazinator wrote: post #10

Here is the thing. If you have a Convention Manual which calls for a certain color for bike sheds, then you use that. Failing that, if you have several other bike sheds of a certain color, then that's what you use, for consistency with existing bike sheds. The color of the bike shed only doesn't matter if it's the only bike shed, and there is no documentation which has already settled the matter.

How boring to have all the bike sheds the same color. I've seen the end result of that - all houses in every direction are 100% identical, both the paint color and the facade in front. I guess they sold them, but I don't understand why anyone would want to live there.

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#55

Post by ht_th »

Macha wrote: post #49
Cantinflas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taught to always speak up in every meeting by my boss at that time. Always, no matrer what, I had to come up with something. If you do that, you'd do me a favour.

This is often my pain as a senior dev. If the more junior members of my team propose something, and it's perfectly acceptable, if I just rubber stamp it then it looks like I didn't read it or do anything. So with some of the past managers I've had, I felt like I had to find something to point out, so best to find something that doesn't inconvenience the proposal author too much. I could see the same dynamic in revers…

Why not compliment them with a job well done? Add some details in your compliment that shows you've read their proposal.

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#56

Post by razeh »

bee_rider wrote: post #26
YZF wrote: post #16

Reminds me of a story a friend related a long time ago about how to manage bosses. That probably applies to bike sheds. The general idea is to introduce a glaring mistake into any proposal you make. Then the boss (or whoever feels like bikeshedding) can "catch" that mistake upon which you congratulate them on their infinite wisdom, fix the mistake, and the project can move along. So to avoid the bikeshed color discus…

Do people actually do this? It seems silly and childish. Although I’ve never had a boss that needed to find an error.

I was writing software at a bank and found a bug. I was told to save it for when we had our audit —- because no matter what, the auditors were going to insist we fixed something and it might as well be something the development team wanted fixed too. I’ve heard of contractors who leave electrical outlets out of their plans so that the building department, which will insist something be changed in the plans (proving the department’s usefulness), does not insist on something hard.

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#57

Post by bluGill »

Just be careful. Paint is very important on a bike shed. If you spend too long arguing you will end up with the weather destroying your bike shed. This was the point, but it is missing something critical.

Color is important even though it serves to objective purpose. Some colors blend in well making an ascetic whole neighborhood better - but even that way can go too far and you get a monotonous mono-tone which is worse than clashing colors! There is - and can be - no agreement on what is best (I'm color blind: I can see colors but not the same way most people do and so even if there was some objective perfect - it would still be different for me vs normal people), but we should spend some time figuring out colors.

The important thing is to give everyone time to think, then express their opinion in a way that everyone else listens to understand (as opposed to listen to rebut) and then we come to a good compromise - understanding letting someone else win is often the best compromise - things like meeting in the middle can be worse!

Re: Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)

#59

Post by maccard »

YZF wrote: post #16

Reminds me of a story a friend related a long time ago about how to manage bosses. That probably applies to bike sheds. The general idea is to introduce a glaring mistake into any proposal you make. Then the boss (or whoever feels like bikeshedding) can "catch" that mistake upon which you congratulate them on their infinite wisdom, fix the mistake, and the project can move along. So to avoid the bikeshed color discus…

I’ve never done this and I’ve never told my team to do it.

What we have done though, and I will continue to do, js force us to leave things we want a decision on in a clearly broken/prototype state. The number of times I’ve gone into meetings to unblock a team only to have the whole thing derailed by a nothingburger bug that was hard to not see was the inspiration.

if you leave the UI element magenta with cyan font instead of default application style then you’ll actually get a discussion on your UI element.

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