[HN Gopher] The Honest Troubleshooting Code of Conduct
___________________________________________________________________
The Honest Troubleshooting Code of Conduct
Author : zdw
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-05-02 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| One real issue here is Slack being used for a RFC rather than
| something like a github issue.
|
| Slack is a great medium for realtime chatting but someone jumping
| into a conversation without context is exactly where it falls
| down. "Ubuntu is doomed" is exactly the sort of comment someone
| skimming to catch up will fixate on and jump to a conclusion -
| even with a code of conduct...
|
| You need a place for conversations to exist that promotes
| asynchronous communication. A github issue is a nice starting
| point since someone can create a summary at the top. The summary
| can be continuously updated. And an intentionally slower/more
| thought out discussion can follow.
|
| "RFC: Company$ moving away from ubuntu" is exactly the sort of
| productive GH issue I've seen at past companies.
|
| Of course GH issues regularly devolve - lots of examples dropped
| into HN over the years where people get angry/inappropriate at
| some poor open source maintainer, but it is still an improvement
| over slack.
| busterarm wrote:
| Slack is being used as a substitute for all kinds of
| communication patterns where it shouldn't be and people tend to
| be assholes about it.
|
| For example, mandatory-participation announcement channels that
| don't actually require any action on the part of the receiver.
| They're used for every corner of the company to self-
| congratulate and should be emails instead of notifications.
|
| For anyone who can make these decisions in their own comapnies,
| if a channel's messages: - do not require
| immediate attention, and - do not require an action,
|
| for the love of god, do not make it a mandatory-participation
| channel.
| Kalium wrote:
| Most of us in software engineering have, at some point,
| encountered someone who does not see a difference between
| technical criticisms of a system and personal attacks on its
| designers and authors. This is an understandable error in a
| junior engineer, an irritating bad habit in a mid-tier engineer,
| and a problem in a senior person. In all cases, the answer often
| winds up being finding a way around them, much as this describes.
|
| I've been places where such people have found their way to
| technical leadership. Finding ways to improve things can rapidly
| become exceptionally difficult.
|
| At this point my only way forward is to have a personal blocklist
| of people whose technical leadership decisions I refuse to ever
| be subject to again. It's a shame, because some of them are also
| brilliant engineers.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I'm well into the senior years of my career, and I have
| certainly been all of these things. But a fellow engineer
| taking things personally is not as problematic as the behavior
| that often accompanies it: never admitting error.
|
| Years ago I heard the phrase "set to bozo bit" to describe what
| you're calling a personal blocklist. It was described as an
| anti-pattern, and setting the bozo bit as a poor choice in
| nearly every case. It combines the bad parts of an ad hominem
| attack with the bad parts of personal arrogance and negativity.
| Don't think your other teammates won't realize you've "blocked"
| a teammate. Some of them will react badly, and potentially see
| you as arrogant.
|
| I end with this quote from E.W. Dijkstra:
|
| We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we
| approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous
| difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant
| programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic
| limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very
| Humble Programmers.
|
| ACM Turing Lecture 1972, "The Humble Programmer"
| Kalium wrote:
| In my case, my bozo list is a handful of names that I use to
| help choose where I will and won't work. If one of these
| people is at that company, I will decline to accept a
| position that will subject me to their leadership. Some may
| see this as arrogant. It certainly assumes I have the
| privilege of multiple options of employer. It's not generally
| been my experience that people react badly to this in
| general, however. I can easily see how it would be much more
| disruptive when internal to a team.
|
| That said, I _have_ seen whole teams set the bozo bit on
| other parts of the organization. For example, I saw the head
| of an infrastructure group refuse to maintain or patch key
| services while insisting on ownership. The security
| organization set the bozo bit on this person and worked to
| protect the organization from the consequences of their
| choices. As an organizational tool, it can be a useful
| caution about known bad-faith actors.
|
| As to your broader point, I think you're correct. Programming
| is difficult, error-prone, and thus benefits from an
| intellectual humility. Approaching it with the mindset that
| you are incapable of error makes this much more challenging.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| How can a handful of names across an entire industry
| meaningfully affect your career choice?
|
| Is this some close knit "paypal mafia" corner of the
| industry where people only work with people they already
| know?
| no_wizard wrote:
| There are parts of our vast industry that aren't as
| large, and the "premier" places to work at are only a few
| big names. Embedded systems comes to mind for me here as
| does something like chipset design or telecommunications
| infrastructure, just to name a few examples I can think
| of
|
| All complex rewarding software jobs but it's not the same
| as say, web development, in terms of choices and volume
| Kalium wrote:
| > How can a handful of names across an entire industry
| meaningfully affect your career choice?
|
| I've found myself approached by recruiters for the exact
| large company and sizable department that one of these
| people has substantial rank in. It's already had an
| impact on my decisions.
| busterarm wrote:
| As someone rounding off 20 years in this industry, I'll
| advise you that it is a _lot_ smaller than you think.
| Some of the people I've met or worked with early in my
| career are big names now due to blogging, writing,
| starting companies, etc.
|
| When I interviewed for my current job, it turned out that
| I had separate, personal, previous-work-experience
| connections to all four of my interviewers and it only
| surfaced during each of the interviews.
|
| And this is after changing my role/specialty.
| ----
|
| And along these lines, be careful who you shit on in this
| industry and be default-nice to everyone. I'll never
| forget one role I had that was fully remote where I was
| mentoring a guy who was a bit on the weaker side
| technically for the job that we were doing. Everyone else
| was constantly telling him that he sucked and was pushing
| him to quit.
|
| It turns out that he was learning the ropes to transition
| to a huge leadership role in the company and no one knew
| it. He had previously led an entire division of a massive
| computer manufacturer, but 2008 wiped out most of his
| retirement and he had to come back to work. The very
| first thing that he did with his new responsibility was
| to give me a huge promotion to work directly under him
| with no interview.
| Supermancho wrote:
| There is no fixing some people. They want to believe that a
| single narrow interpretation of something is right, by their
| own experience. You cannot change their mind. eg There is no
| multiple inheritance in Java so you aren't going to use Java.
| Lammy wrote:
| > There is no fixing some people. They want to believe that
| a single narrow interpretation of something is right
|
| How would I not be doing the same thing if I looked at
| other people as needing to be "fixed" any time their
| thought processes don't work exactly like mine?
| mcguire wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I was mildly troubled by the comment towards the end, "
| _There were third- and fourth-generation members who I had no
| idea about who had signed up to talk about reliability
| without being second-guessed to death and hounded by people
| who just wanted to talk about [...] "a lot of work went into
| that"._"
|
| I've been sensitized, I guess. Yes, the way we do things is
| probably stupid. Yes, your favorite new framework or method
| or language or whatever might trivially fix all the problems
| _that you can see_. Heck, you might even _be_ the smartest
| person in the room. But, there might also be a reason things
| things are stuck at a historical, local maximum.
| Kalium wrote:
| You are absolutely right, and I think the author would
| agree with you. Sometimes there are strong, compelling
| reasons that justify not changing things.
|
| Inconveniently, sometimes the reason is "a lot of work went
| into that".
| throwaway-bozo wrote:
| I am well into those years myself, and respectfully, while I
| agree with the importance of being humble and remembering the
| incredible challenge of the task, the bozo bit can be very
| valuable. Not everyone in this industry is a hardworking
| talented joy operating in good faith.
|
| To give a concrete example, at one point in my career, I was
| leading a team trapped on a death march project. We did not
| have the option of abandoning it, due to a meaningful
| fraction of the company's revenue riding on its success. We
| did not have the option of more resources for the usual
| reasons. And we did not have the option of more time, because
| executives had already de facto announced when it would be
| done. Unfortunately, our direct upstream dependency in the
| company saw us as a rival - because they had wanted to own
| this project - and spent multiple years trying every way they
| could to sabotage and undermine us, including lying to us in
| meetings, lying about us to others, changing key system
| aspects to make our problem harder to solve, denying access
| to critical resources and people, pitting vendors against
| each other, and giving unsolicited negative peer reviews to
| people working on our team.
|
| To say this was a difficult experience would be an
| understatement. I had four employees quit. I myself started
| having panic attacks twice a week and was in therapy for over
| a year to work through the crippling anxiety I was feeling
| every waking moment. I still have persistent health issues
| from the incredible stress of those years. We landed the
| thing, got our pats on the back, and then I quit.
|
| The main guy responsible for this campaign of sabotage and
| mistreatment was much higher level than me in the company and
| punching down as hard as he could. He left successfully for a
| larger role at another company once it became clear that our
| team was going to hurdle any roadblock he threw at us. It was
| a knock-down, drag-out fight. I will never do anything like
| it again.
|
| If I ever found myself working with that person or any of his
| leads again in any capacity I would quit instantly. The bit
| is set.
| busterarm wrote:
| Here here! I can get behind this for sure.
|
| I also agree with the utility of the bozo bit. I worked
| somewhere where a long time engineer got Peter/Dilbert
| Principled at just the level of Team Lead. Once you've done
| four years or so in the org, they don't fire you just
| motivate you to quit. Anyway, this person gets moved into a
| Lead role with a team of one person where he can do the
| least harm. He's awful to work with, can't communicate
| properly and derails every meeting he's in with complete
| tangents.
|
| Bozo bit!
| knl wrote:
| Why going through all of that (honest curiosity)? 4 people
| quit and you had panic attacks just to deliver something
| for a company that didn't care much. Wouldn't it have been
| easier that the whole team left early on? Your mental
| health would be way better, as well as of your teammates.
| throwaway-bozo wrote:
| When you're in the thick of it, the fog of war is real.
|
| It's hard to overstate how hard it is to leave this kind
| of project as a manager. You spend years of your life
| building relationships with engineers and trying (and
| sometimes failing, admittedly, but trying) to protect
| them. You know the situation is a disaster and you want
| to get out of it. But you're afraid of letting down your
| people and hurting their careers. You're afraid the next
| person won't be able to protect them as well. You're
| afraid of losing the years in your resume and not
| accomplishing anything. You're afraid of being a failure
| if you give up. When your body is breaking down due to
| the stress, you're afraid to lose your health insurance.
|
| You're right - I should have quit as soon as it was clear
| it was a death march. But in the shit, I found it almost
| impossible to lift my head up and say "this is literally
| killing me, I quit". When each individual day is at your
| maximum trauma threshold, it's hard to work up the time,
| willpower, or ability to interview prep and change
| companies.
|
| I regret it immensely.
| knl wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying, and really sorry that you had to
| go through all of that. As I read, I see that there were
| many factors at play, some of them personal, some of them
| cultural -- in my country, the health insurance doesn't
| depend on employer, for example. But on the other hand, I
| also saw some people here killing themselves to work,
| mostly not to let down others.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Because quitting means they stop paying you.
|
| And unless you live somewhere where new jobs are
| available that match your skills and current pay that can
| be enough.
| knl wrote:
| Dunno, I can't speak with certainty that I wouldn't stay
| and leave, as everything depends on the situation, but
| switching to a less demanding job and lower pay seems as
| something that would benefit me in the long run. My
| mental health and family are worth any price difference,
| that is, they can't pay me that much to stay in a shitty
| situation.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Yeah, I read
|
| > We did not have the option of abandoning it, due to a
| meaningful fraction of the company's revenue riding on
| its success. We did not have the option of more resources
| for the usual reasons. And we did not have the option of
| more time, because executives had already de facto
| announced when it would be done.
|
| And immediately concluded that the company has already
| committed to suicide and it's time to start sending
| resumes. Cross-team sabotage is icing on the cake but
| actually doesn't change anything here.
| zxzax wrote:
| >It combines the bad parts of an ad hominem attack with the
| bad parts of personal arrogance and negativity. Don't think
| your other teammates won't realize you've "blocked" a
| teammate. Some of them will react badly, and potentially see
| you as arrogant.
|
| You are saying this as a senior engineer who is in a better
| position to do something else about being on the receiving
| end of those personal attacks. I respect that and I hope you
| are able to keep doing it. But that isn't the case when the
| abuse is continuing over a long period of time, that means no
| other senior person stepped up to do anything about it, and
| the people on the receiving either have to quit, or risk
| getting fired for "insubordination" because they filed a
| complaint against a senior employee. Playing the office
| politics game and trying to avoid the abusive employee is not
| sustainable, as you've acknowledged.
| [deleted]
| monksy wrote:
| This sounds like the Cats vs Zio drama. Most of it revolves
| arround 'we don't like JDG'
| jart wrote:
| I always try to pounce on negative feedback since it might be
| the sort of thing other people are thinking too but aren't
| mentioning out of politeness. If you think about things that
| way, you'll optimize your way to senior engineer real fast.
|
| It's not personal. It's strictly business.
| Lammy wrote:
| > without being second-guessed to death and hounded by people who
| just wanted to talk about "our tone" or "a lot of work went into
| that"
|
| Assume the best intent?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I like that, but it probably won't work, as the people that jump
| in, out of context, are the same ones that scroll to the bottom
| of the Ts&Cs, and bang on "ACCEPT." That's OK. I've learned the
| benefit of building a community by _example_ , as opposed to
| fiat. The people that follow it will be the ones that don't need
| to read it, and they will provide the example.
|
| I'm an "older" engineer (just turned 59. I really don't give a
| damn what people think of it. That's one of the benefits of being
| my age). I have about 40 years of experience in tech; the vast
| majority, writing software. Sometimes, quite badly.
|
| Also, almost my entire career has been in "shipping" software;
| not just "writing" it. This has meant that I've always been
| pretty damn close to the end-user; sometimes, to the point of
| receiving personal...erm... _feedback_. Let 's call it
| "feedback." I've also been responsible for _delivering complete
| product_ , with polish and support. It wasn't "someone else's
| job" to clean things up. It was _my_ job (it still is -even more
| so, these days).
|
| I've watched (and caused) some real Jurassic-scale disasters,
| over the years.
|
| That's one of the reasons I write damn good software, these days.
| Nothing like being given a bag and a stick, and told to clean up
| the mess (even if it was someone else's mess), to teach humility
| and caution.
|
| So, that means that I'm often the guy that says things like "Are
| you _sure_ you want to do that? I did it once, and it did not end
| well. "
|
| In today's "cargo" culture, that's considered "being negative,"
| or "being timid, and only _the bold_ survive, " etc. _ad
| nauseam_.
|
| I'm told that I'm "not a team player," or that I'm "harshing the
| vibe" (I actually made up the second one, but you get the
| picture).
|
| This is funny, because my entire life has been ferociously
| dedicated to _making difficult things happen_. Precisely the
| opposite of being "too cautious to leave the starting gate."
| I've always been about "That's a difficult thing, and here are
| some of the things that might go wrong, along with a bunch we
| can't foresee. Let's figure out how to do it, anyway. We just
| need to be careful and circumspect."
|
| That's pretty typical with experienced folks in any profession;
| not just tech. We often have a lot of callous and scar tissue.
|
| Yes, we can be so timid, that we are too gun-shy to try difficult
| things, but we are also fairly likely to actually _make it
| happen_ , if we take on the job.
|
| For myself, I tend to look for "dreamers," who have ideas, and
| then help them to actually realize their dreams, as opposed to
| some of these Krakatoa-level explosions that we see happen,
| because the execution of a perfectly good idea was flawed and
| ill-considered.
|
| That's what "engineering" is to me.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| They will read it when they get kicked out of the channel for
| violating the rules that they haven't read.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| But it tends to work out better, when we guide them through
| what's needed to participate. Sometimes, their presence is
| something we want; just not their behavior.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, though this depends on the size of the channel - in a
| somewhat similar vein, see how Reddit basically gave up on
| parts of the netiquette by instead automating parts of it.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Im not sure but i think the only place to have that "we're here
| to work, not play soap opera at work" environment may be open
| warfare.
| NateEag wrote:
| If The Illiad is to be trusted, open warfare still has plenty
| of soap opera.
|
| Humans are emotional creatures no matter the context.
|
| You can't change that - all you can do is accept it then learn
| how to work with emotions (both yours and those of other
| people).
|
| IMO, the "adults in the room" are usually the people who have
| deep technical knowledge and have also learned how to regulate
| their emotions. One without the other gets you nowhere.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Open warfare or enterprise development.
|
| Though at least the former has the Geneva Conventions.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I honestly found this completely unreadable. For example (and
| there are many others), what does this even mean:
|
| > This place hadn't quite ascended to the level of giving outages
| notable names ("Call the Cops", "Silent Night", "A Tree Did It"
| being just a few from elsewhere), it remained just "1152" after
| an associated ticket in a bug tracking system.
| xsmasher wrote:
| "It" refers to this outage.
|
| Changing the subject mid-sentence does harm readability.
| eecc wrote:
| I think she used the wrong conjunction, but the meaning is
| quite clear
| yaacov wrote:
| Facebook names their biggest outages and turns them into parts
| of the company mythology. Part of that is cool naming.
| vitus wrote:
| It's not just Facebook.
|
| It's easier in a conversation to refer to an outage that was
| caused by a system called Maya by a descriptive canonical
| name like "Mayan Apocalypse", than to refer to it as 14351.
| As companies grow and accumulate more interesting outages, it
| becomes harder to keep all these magic numbers in your mental
| cache.
| busterarm wrote:
| In this case the company being referred to IS Facebook
| though.
| rachelbythebay wrote:
| https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/04/news/companies/facebook-
| out...
|
| I always wanted to apologize to Sgt. Brink for having to
| take my calls that day.
| klyrs wrote:
| She's recently quit a company, and is not naming that company.
| She's written a few articles about the reasons for her
| departure, and they're all very opaque. Full of stuff that
| folks on the inside will understand, that the rest of us can
| make guesses about. At times, she's pretty explicit that she's
| writing for her former co-workers, if not to give hope, at
| least to make them feel seen & heard about experiences they
| can't talk about.
| spamalot159 wrote:
| Does anyone know what company she is referring to? Seems like
| Facebook could be likely.
| busterarm wrote:
| Facebook is the previous company she quit to this one.
| I found myself in yet another tech gig in an attempt to
| provide reliability to a company that (as it turned out)
| was about to have its IPO.
|
| There's a big hint as to the name of the company in the
| post. If you look at companies that are expected to IPO in
| the very near term, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
| MapleWalnut wrote:
| Lyft
| pjc50 wrote:
| Just as some vulnerabilities have names like "Heartbleed" or
| "Spectre", some incidents leave enough of a mark on the company
| culture that they are assigned names.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I obviously don't know all the details here, as this is, by
| definition, just one person's version of events. That said, I'm
| always highly skeptical of any account that essentially paints
| many/most others in the org as the source of the dysfunction, and
| if only they implemented my brilliant idea would things get
| fixed.
|
| All large organizations have varying degrees of dysfunction, some
| more than others. Sometimes that dysfunction is toxic, but other
| times it's just a result of people being human with different
| opinions of how best to do things. Coming in to a new
| organization and making an announcement that is some version of
| "you're doing it wrong", unless you're very high up in the org,
| is rarely successful.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > I'm always highly skeptical of any account that essentially
| paints many/most others in the org as the source of the
| dysfunction, and if only they implemented my brilliant idea
| would things get fixed.
|
| I didn't get that take from the article at all; I've been a
| part of one of the orgs she's describing and had the same
| experience. Over a couple years we went from a raucous, rough-
| and-tumble culture of open debate on the technical merits to a
| "polite" "respectful" org where nobody dared pop their head
| over the trench and bad decisions were allowed to continue
| unchallenged until they were nigh-irreversible. Much of it was
| due to a single executive's behavior. He was a big bully,
| always had to be right, and you _knew_ that if you ever
| expressed an opinion about anything in his domain, he 'd come
| after you like a fucking pitbull and worry your flesh until you
| submitted, using the power of his office and his connection to
| the founder to ensure you bent the knee.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _[A] raucous, rough-and-tumble culture of open debate on
| the technical merits_ "
|
| does not conflict with
|
| " _a "polite" "respectful" org_"
|
| while
|
| " _a big bully, always had to be right, and you knew that if
| you ever expressed an opinion about anything in his domain,
| he 'd come after you like a fucking pitbull and worry your
| flesh until you submitted, using the power of his office and
| his connection to the founder to ensure you bent the knee_"
|
| has, in my experience more in common with _not_ being the
| second. In fact, in my experience, what I think you mean by
| "rough-and-tumble culture" supports the pitbulls much more
| than any form of making good decisions.
| detaro wrote:
| I assume the "" are relevant in _" polite" "respectful"_
| (i.e. a culture thats only very superficially so/only when
| it is convenient), and that's very much in conflict with
| open debate.
| autarch wrote:
| > Over a couple years we went from a raucous, rough-and-
| tumble culture of open debate on the technical merits to a
| "polite" "respectful" org where nobody dared pop their head
| over the trench and bad decisions were allowed to continue
| unchallenged until they were nigh-irreversible.
|
| I don't think polite and respectful are in opposition to open
| debate. If someone can't make a point in a debate without
| being polite and respectful, I really don't want to work with
| them.
| csande17 wrote:
| I have found that it's very, very easy for some people
| operating in bad faith to turn ANY opposing argument into a
| violation of "politeness" and "respect". A real example
| from an internal discussion I witnessed once:
|
| A: We should use $FRAMEWORK for everything in $APP because
| it provides a better developer experience. Sure, long list
| views might be slower, but we hardly ever need to care
| about long lists.
|
| B: Almost every screen in $APP is a long list! I don't
| think we should compromise performance on $FEATURE,
| $FEATURE, or $FEATURE for this -- benchmarks suggest they'd
| be four to five times slower.
|
| A: [to B's manager, cc HR] By making such an obvious
| statement as "almost every screen in $APP is a long list"
| in a public Slack channel, B made me feel uncomfortable by
| implying I wasn't familiar with $APP, even though I've
| worked on it for several years. That is an unacceptably
| disrespectful way to hold a technical discussion.
| mcguire wrote:
| How much harder is it for someone operating in bad faith
| to turn the lack of politeness and respect to their
| advantage? My personal experience would suggest it's even
| easier.
|
| [dang's pretty good about enforcing politeness and
| respect, so I won't try to present any examples. :-)]
| pjc50 wrote:
| This is also known as "tone policing".
| autarch wrote:
| AFAICT, B was polite and respectful while engaging in
| open debate. The problem here is A, not B. The problem is
| _not_ the requirement to be polite and respectful.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Sure, but now the case is before HR and B has to waste
| cycles defending themselves. Or, depending on just how
| dysfunctional the place is, they never even hear of the
| false accusation until months later when it has already
| metastasized through the organization.
|
| Obviously people should be polite and respectful, but
| when there is too much posturing around these facts, it's
| easy for malicious actors to weaponize.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > AFAICT, B was polite and respectful while engaging in
| open debate.
|
| Yep.
|
| > The problem here is A, not B.
|
| I'm pretty sure the implied problem is "B's manager" and
| "HR".
|
| > The problem is _not_ the requirement to be polite and
| respectful.
|
| The problem is that this requirement is not seperable
| from the details of how it's interpreted and enforced,
| and in a plurality of organizations that talk about
| "politeness" and "respect", it is in fact interpreted and
| enforced in a A(-hole)-ish manner, rather than a manner
| based on actual politeness and respect. Conversely,
| organizations that care about _actual_ politeness and
| respect generally don 't belabor the point as much as
| those that use it as a flimsy excuse, so people tend[0]
| to see a _explicitly_ "'polite' 'respectful' org" as
| warning sign of the latter.
|
| 0: rightly or wrongly; I'm not sure how the statistics
| work out on that one.
|
| TL;DR: as other people have pointed out, the scare quotes
| are there for a reason.
| rectang wrote:
| Don't a lot of companies strive for high "psychological
| safety" these days for the very reason of encouraging open
| debate, ensuring that bold ideas are actually given an
| airing rather than held back?
| autarch wrote:
| I think this is exactly what companies should be striving
| for. I can't say how many do strive for it, of course.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| > I don't think polite and respectful are in opposition to
| open debate.
|
| Nor do I, hence the scare quotes. In fact there was nothing
| polite or respectful about it--it was an environment of
| fear.
| afarrell wrote:
| Generally, putting a single word in quotation marks changes
| the meaning to refer to a facsimile of the word.
|
| polite: actual politeness
|
| "polite": unwilling to say something that another person
| might feel upset about.
|
| -------------------------
|
| Also, there are ways that politeness obscures information-
| sharing. For example: I am saying the above at the risk of
| being condescending.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > if only they implemented my brilliant idea would things get
| fixed.
|
| That is not how "Did it work? Kinda" reads to me.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| > Coming in to a new organization and making an announcement
| that is some version of "you're doing it wrong",
|
| Is hurting your career if your are low level. If you are high
| level, it's hurting the team and the company. A new hire exec
| who thinks they know more than the veteran staff is a shortcut
| to destroying a company.
| sneak wrote:
| I think every organization above a certain size necessarily ends
| up with informal (or sometimes formal) groups of "adults in the
| room" that handle important things in good faith, as a
| coordinated team. It's inherently discriminatory against a
| certain type of employee (one who would rather metagame the
| organization itself rather than address the market/customers/ops)
| but quite necessary.
| lazyant wrote:
| Problem is (as it seems the case in the author's case) when
| this group (I really loathe the term "adults in the room", by
| exclusion the rest of people are children or to be treated as
| such) has people with power that are "well actually" people
| just there to pontificate from their inflated egos without
| letting others do their jobs.
| hitekker wrote:
| > one who would rather metagame the organization itself rather
| than address the market/customers/ops
|
| Saved for future reference. My company has an exploding number
| of metagamers with an ever shrinking number of "adults in the
| room". It's stagnating hard.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Typically, this is a problem of success. Success attracts
| metagamers, which leads to less success, so they leave.
| Repeat until insolvency/heat death of the universe.
| noir_lord wrote:
| One of the best things you can do when you join a new
| organisation is figure out who those people are.
|
| They often know where the bodies are buried (or that obscure
| document stored on a documentation system from two generations
| ago that was deprecated but never removed "just in case" that
| describes exactly the system you are currently looking at
| wondering "wtf").
|
| In an idealised world it wouldn't happen but I've never managed
| to work anywhere close to that.
| hitekker wrote:
| I've heard a strategy to start with asking "who do you
| respect the most in this org?" or "who is the most
| knowledgeable person in the org?". Keep repeating that across
| every 1:1 and you may eventually build an influence graph.
| offbyone wrote:
| I have been fortunate enough to land in a part of my employer's
| technical culture governed -- roughly -- by this sort of idea,
| albeit not one that's written down anywhere. The people in the
| Slack channels (IRC, back in the day, but time marches on...)
| that I frequent are the ones who provide some of the backchannel
| cross-team communication and technical analysis that make our
| company work.
|
| I like this article a lot; if I were trying to replicate the
| community I've got now, I'd probably start with this.
| yongjik wrote:
| Well, being an introvert dork, I'm not the one to lecture others
| on how to effectively correct others, but, reading this:
|
| > I was talking about infrastructure, and specifically the wobbly
| mess of shitty "we're gonna run Flask everywhere and call it
| microservices" that somehow let people accomplish things over the
| Internet. Absolutely amazing.
|
| If this is how she talks at work, it's unsurprising that people
| would find the attitude abrasive. (And if this is _not_ how she
| talks at work, then maybe she could tone down on dramatization a
| bit? Well, I mean, sure, it 's her personal blog so she can say
| whatever she wants, but still ...)
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Seems like there is missing context here. Part of doing your job
| is communicating changes and explaining your reasoning when
| needed, "Unbuntu is doomed" doesn't really cover the need for
| communications. From the story I have no idea why there would be
| a need to switch form Ubuntu to Fedora - seems like a personal
| preference choice and that might look like change for the sake of
| change and no meaningful benefit to someone in a another group.
| Feeling like there is another side to the story here.
| Certhas wrote:
| It seems to me that this is kind of irrelevant to the point of
| the post. Also, if you would like more context, there is a
| first sentence to this post that links the post that explains
| the context. Specifically:
|
| > What would happen is this: a couple of people would get to
| talking (on Slack, for that is what they used) about something
| technical. There might be a topic at hand, like "Ubuntu is
| doomed", and they'd be hashing it out, figuring out what that
| meant. Then, invariably, someone would pop in two or three
| hours later, hit the hated "start thread" button on one of the
| comments, and would start shitting all over them.
|
| > "OMG why are you hating on Canonical" "Ubuntu is NOT DOOMED"
|
| > And then the people involved would have to walk this person
| back and say, look friend, Ubuntu _at this company_ is doomed,
| because the company has decided that everything is moving from
| flavor X to flavor Y, and all of the flavor Y images are built
| from Fedora (yeah, I know, ignore that for this story) instead
| of X 's Ubuntu. So once we're done with the migration, Ubuntu
| _at this company_ is a goner!
| wilsynet wrote:
| Author is saying that the company already decided they are
| migrating from Ubuntu to Fedora. That's not the controversy.
|
| In a Slack channel, someone said "Ubuntu is doomed". Not
| because Ubuntu, as a distro, will soon reach end-of-life, but
| because at $COMPANY, Ubuntu will be replaced by Fedora. That is
| to say, "Ubuntu is doomed (at $COMPANY)".
|
| What author is objecting to is people joining the conversation
| several hours later and expressing unhappiness that someone is
| predicting the end of Ubuntu everywhere.
|
| But that's because the new person wasn't in the conversation,
| lacks context, and maybe should start by assuming the best
| intent rather than the worst intent.
| busterarm wrote:
| To me this is also a problem with how people use Slack. Slack
| usage is full of anti-patterns and I miss email as the venue
| for purposeful discussion.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-02 23:02 UTC)