[HN Gopher] Things to say when you're losing a technical argumen...
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Things to say when you're losing a technical argument (2001)
Author : zkldi
Score : 183 points
Date : 2021-11-05 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| xscott wrote:
| 1) I think I was wrong.
|
| 2) Thank you.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If you make this change, I will fork the code.
| i_like_apis wrote:
| Adding: "That isn't PEP8"
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| Oh my god, all my managers were terrible people..
|
| Oh my god, I'm a terrible person!!
|
| :)
| sitkack wrote:
| I like, "I see your point, you are right"
| dang wrote:
| Some past threads:
|
| _Things to Say When You 're Losing a Technical Argument [2001]_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7982845 - July 2014 (2
| comments)
|
| _Things to Say When You 're Losing a Technical Argument (2001)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440999 - June 2010 (21
| comments)
| skrebbel wrote:
| I like "We need this to fit on a single floppy" and I use it all
| the time
| moffkalast wrote:
| That won't scale.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > Can you generate some USE CASES that would justify the change?
|
| Oh so this is where some people in the Go community got their
| main argument against generics...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...
|
| >It doesn't. That's just a "template" file, which I use search
| and replace in order to generate the three monomorphized go
| files.
|
| >If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're
| characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which
| are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's
| just one long identifier.
| ww520 wrote:
| An AI/ML bot can slurp these up and be a competently sounding
| CTO.
| [deleted]
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I guess #64 is best followed by an odd handshake.
| yasserf wrote:
| A guy being interviewed as a CTO was trying to argue an entire
| rewrite was needed to move from Postgres to MongoDB (for tabular
| data). His argument was, and I quote: 'I'm right, and I don't
| need to explain myself to you.'. That was to the non technical
| cofounder. To myself he just said, 'I don't mean any disrespect,
| but you don't know how to scale '. This was literally for a basic
| crud application with 0.1% usage on a RDS micro instance.
|
| I would have loved to hear any technical excuse
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I'm right, and I don't need to explain myself to you.
|
| Having "I'm an asshole" tattooed on his forehead would have
| been less noticeable. We should all be so lucky that
| interviewees give such clear cut signals.
| vonnik wrote:
| Update for 2021:
|
| But is it multi-cloud?
| d23 wrote:
| > I thought that whole idea was discredited years ago.
|
| I cackled pretty hard at this one.
| handrous wrote:
| That one's evergreen, in Web Dev. Whatever pattern's current
| now was a laughable newb mistake that'd get you branded too
| dumb to do web dev, a few years ago. In another couple years,
| it'll be "common knowledge" that the current thing was always
| terrible, and the new thing, which is now considered extremely
| dumb and nothing a pro would ever do, will be in vogue.
| nineplay wrote:
| "You are just trying to pad your resume with latest <cool tech>"
| drawqrtz wrote:
| Is there a slackbot that I can use to just auto reply these to
| request?
| ketralnis wrote:
| Yes, but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?
| moffkalast wrote:
| There are, of course, various export limitations on that
| technology.
| joshuaellinger wrote:
| My favorite is "Now, that's not a stupid idea".
|
| I used to do that with a friend at my first job. We'd argue for
| hours until we found a good solution. The joke, of course, is
| that everything before then was stupid.
|
| Of course, this assumes goodwill and friendship between the
| arguing parties. There is nothing wrong with losing an argument
| when a better solution exists.
| ghoul2 wrote:
| At an Internet-major co in my country, my VP Engineering told me
| "We don't run stuff downloaded from the internet around here" - I
| was proposing to trial a Solr/Lucene based search backend as a
| replacement for the awful MySQL based hacked-together search they
| then had.
|
| I wanted to ask him if he got his copies of
| Apache/Mysql/php/Redhat on government stamp paper. Instead, I
| quit two weeks later.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Maybe they just installed it from redhat cd-roms or dvd-roms
| and never updated their systems, and considered it
| "trustworthy" because it came on physical media from the
| vendor. Have seen that more than once.
| bluedino wrote:
| I worked at a place where I couldn't download Linux and
| install it, I had to buy it from somewhere. I bought whatever
| the latest version of Redhat was, and then I downloaded the
| latest from their site (since I'd have to update anyway), and
| nobody questioned it even though I installed it way before
| the software actually got delivered.
|
| On the other hand, I bought the most expensive version I
| could ($139 vs $49 or $79, just to throw some money Redhat's
| way)
| handrous wrote:
| Meanwhile, at the company that creates those disks:
| _downloads images from the Internet, burns them to CD_
| walrus01 wrote:
| exactly!
| handrous wrote:
| Maybe the brilliant 5D chess move here would have been to
| download what was needed, then put it on a disc with a
| printed label.
|
| 6D Chess: set up an LLC to do this, and convince the
| place to buy the discs at significant markup.
| walrus01 wrote:
| On a more serious note, when the VP of engineering or CTO
| or somebody similar takes such a dreadfully ignorant
| approach, it's a very good indicator that something is
| more fundamentally wrong and to jump ship.
|
| Such a person should be at least capable of understanding
| the modern concept of how something like a .deb file is
| authenticated based on its hash from the public gpg keys
| for the debian package server in question, or the
| equivalent thereof for redhat/centos.
| sitkack wrote:
| That could get you some jailtime if the org decides you
| are embezzling, witness poorly done versions of the this
| same scam.
| jrace wrote:
| I like your idea. Why don't you write up a white paper and we'll
| review it at the next staff meeting?
|
| That is a sure-fire way to stop most people.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I don't suggest doing this as a passive-aggressive attack, but
| I use a variant when presenting to a group that includes the
| "always negative" person. I suggest they do some work
| investigating and sharing alternatives to the things that
| "won't work" and they miraculously start focusing on viable
| solutions.
| Frost1x wrote:
| I've actually had this happen, so I pretty much wrote a white
| paper (charging company time and delegating time from dedicated
| efforts by way of the name of the person who requested it).
|
| I sent it, then continually followed up on the status of the
| points made. Some changes ultimately did get integrated because
| of it, I think calling the bluff forced someone to actively
| read, think, and respond to it, even if it wasn't leadership,
| they had someone else spot check and agree/disagree on points.
| divbzero wrote:
| There's something to be said for corporate cultures that
| require written memos describing each new proposal. Forcing
| people to "actively read, think, and respond" is a great way
| to increase the likelihood that the best ideas bubble up to
| the top.
| jollybean wrote:
| It's more likely to make those who are able to manage
| bureaucracies get their ideas to the top.
|
| Requiring some basic rigour to the thinking is good though.
| bobthechef wrote:
| Indeed. It cuts down on impulsive and thoughtless
| decisions.
| csydas wrote:
| > Forcing people to "actively read, think, and respond" is
| a great way to increase the likelihood that the best ideas
| bubble up to the top.
|
| I think that it requires acknowledgment that there are two
| sides to such issues; as someone who is on the side that
| typically ends up having to handle the majority of the busy
| work to get many proposal through in my company I
| absolutely want the proposer to make the effort to figure
| out the stakeholders/costs/challenges for their project as
| well as answers. I'm willing to __fill in gaps__, but I
| don't really want to be having to do the basic legwork for
| someone else's project.
|
| I don't mean to sound like I want to stifle inconvenient
| creativity; it's certainly not the case, and when someone
| has really taken the time to make some new tooling/project
| with benefits and acknowledges the costs involved, I'm more
| than happy to champion such projects.
|
| But when someone just has a desire (or disparagingly, a
| whim) to change stuff up because it simplifies their
| workflow and they expect someone else to handle all of the
| communication of their project without even giving me the
| courtesy of doing such research, I cannot deny I approach
| such proposals negatively as I feel a bit used and I think
| that the expectation is "I want this, make it happen",
| which is not my job.
|
| Similarly, I find myself encountering persons who expect
| that I and the rest of the company will magically intuit
| the importance of very niche projects without being willing
| to take the time to simply explain the pain point they wish
| to address. I'm not even talking about deep technical
| details here, but simple things like:
|
| "We spend N amount of time on task X"
|
| "I have an automation workflow that will require Y hours to
| implement, but N is reduced by Z [time value]"
|
| Instead, the presentation is "I want to implement this
| automation workflow; what do you mean explain the value?
| Can't you see it? Why are we so caught up in corporate
| bureaucracy?"
|
| I'm all for reducing N as much as possible, but if I myself
| can't explain why spending Y is vastly cheaper than N, I
| have no confidence in my ability to convince others that
| the cost of Y is worth it.
|
| I've truly been on both sides, and it is some work to
| justify a change, sure. Formal proposal documents are a bit
| much for my taste, but whether we like it or not, C-Levels
| aren't going to read your code and they definitely aren't
| going to read a 2000+ word stream-of-consciousness email
| describing the project in an unstructured way (much less
| any git readme.md files). The impetus is on the person
| proposing the change to at least make an effort to convey
| the reason for the change to the relevant stakeholders.
| shoto_io wrote:
| AFAIK amazon is pretty well-known for that? Some say it was
| key to their success story.
| mjfl wrote:
| some people will call your bluff.
| jrace wrote:
| Perfect.
|
| Its not a bluff, it is a way of weeding out the non-serious
| requests.
|
| If you take the time then so will I.
| anders_p wrote:
| > some people will call your bluff.
|
| Its not a bluff, when the point is to weed out the ones, who
| aren't willing to actually do a written proposal.
| romero-jk wrote:
| How?
|
| One could answer, "Sure, but that will take away time from
| current things that need attention."
| endisneigh wrote:
| I hope you don't work at Google with that attitude, lol.
|
| context: design docs are frequently written at G.
| sitkack wrote:
| I have seen google design docs at google, most are trash.
| Most design docs everywhere are trash. The confuse more than
| they explain. I don't care if the idea is good, if the design
| doc stinks, it will kill a good idea.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Effectively communicating a complex idea is a skill that's
| orthogonal to coming up with good ideas.
|
| I advise other engineers, especially those early in their
| careers, to actively develop and hone their communication
| skills. It deserves far more focus than most people seem to
| give it.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| At google, the templates for my 1 pager used to be two pages
| long
| isoskeles wrote:
| Is there a difference between white paper and design doc? My
| impression is that a white paper is more academic, and so I'm
| not sure what it ends up looking like.
|
| At one of my jobs, we wrote design docs for most major
| changes (we had a checklist for deciding if the doc was
| necessary at all). It was ultimately quite helpful because
| documentation about most important changes existed, even if
| the dev didn't write any documentation in code. The technical
| designs also had a template, so it was a fairly easy path for
| a developer to know what questions to answer or not in their
| doc.
|
| Is this the same idea as a white paper?
| pie42000 wrote:
| White paper sounds cooler
| dqpb wrote:
| On the flip side, it's amazing how many minds you can change
| with a small demo captured in a simple slide deck.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Aka "The Wally Reflector": https://dilbert.com/strip/2005-07-10
|
| I do this all the time, sometimes even something as simple as
| asking the user to write up the request in an email is enough
| for them to go away forever. It's a simple way to check if the
| requestor is invested in the request, or just trying to slide
| something from their to-do list to yours with zero effort...
| bobthechef wrote:
| Whom would it stop?
|
| If your argument is any good, then all this whitepaper would do
| is make a better case. Asking for a whitepaper is not a bad
| thing for ideas that require some careful consideration.
| They're overkill for trivialities that can be fully decided
| here-and-now and or for things that don't really matter.
|
| Too often have I seen developers running in circles chasing
| ideas that could have been ruled out with a little forethought
| and analysis. They'll respond superficially to some idea that
| tickles their fancy, waste a bunch of time implementing it only
| to either realize that it's a bad idea, that it has serious
| drawbacks, or better yet, leave everyone with a dreadful piece
| of garbage to maintain.
| anders_p wrote:
| > Whom would it stop?
|
| > They're overkill for trivialities ... and or for things
| that don't really matter.
|
| I think you answered your own question.
| goostavos wrote:
| This is par the course at Amazon and, honestly, I think it's
| pretty great.
|
| We all tend to get a lot of ill-thought out pet ideas about
| what _needs_ to happen in a project. Even a tiny informal doc
| listing out what problems you 're actually trying to solve is a
| massive boon for communication.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I agree. I'm a big fan of the lightweight design doc-- what's
| the background, what are the motivations, what's the
| proposal, what are the alternatives and why aren't we doing
| them, what are the implications and potential downsides, does
| the proposal change anything about our exposures as far as
| security, privacy, etc.
|
| I like the discipline of writing these out for myself, I like
| reviewing them, and I like being able to look back on them
| for my own past projects as a way to quickly warm my mental
| cache.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Could you share the basic outline / structure? Which points
| need to be addressed?
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Sure, could you just put your request in a google doc and
| share the link here?
|
| Just let me know what you want to learn, how you hope to
| use it, and what you've tried in the past.
|
| kthx
| pie42000 wrote:
| Yeah, gimme one sec and I will draft up a white paper on
| drafting whitepapers
| shoto_io wrote:
| Good one! I promise to wait for it right here until you
| get back!
| dekhn wrote:
| This is a great idea. Can you write a design doc? Please make
| sure it's fully fleshed out.
| loxias wrote:
| Amazon is like this, and it's part of why I think I never
| worked out well. Too much process. Compounding the pain was the
| fact that my instinct would always be to whip up a proof-of-
| concept demo instead, for the next meeting.
|
| Management hated that, and to this day I don't get why. I
| recognize the need for things to be reviewed by others, and we
| all can lose scope of what's important sometimes. I'm no
| exception. However, for things that are purely
| technical/scientific arguments, what's gained by me having to
| use the Official Template (tm) to propose an idea, and spending
| days messing with words and bullet points, rather than a demo
| that you can see with your own eyes?
|
| It also struck me as quite hypocritical. On the one hand,
| professing to have a "bias for action", then on the other hand
| harshing on people for preferring action over another TPS
| reports.
|
| See also: CIA memo "How to Infiltrate an Organization and Make
| it Dysfunctional" _grin_
| cadamsau wrote:
| > Management hated that
|
| There's a subtle but important thing to note here. My bet is
| management didn't hate that you did a POC. They hated that
| you DIDN'T also do a writeup.
|
| It's not about this vs that. Meet the minimum requirements
| before you go doing extra.
| patmcguire wrote:
| Yeah, it's good for these kinds of discussions when it's a
| universal requirement, or when the white paper concerns will
| actually be addressed before confirming a design. I do get
| suspicious when it comes up for the first time when it's
| something someone doesn't want to hear, or when the discussion
| continues on like it's obviously untrue in the meantime.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> I like your idea. Why don 't you write up a white paper and
| we'll review it at the next staff meeting_
|
| I once fell in this trap. Almost two months researching
| competitors to a solution I had proposed because a coworker
| proposed something else. At the meeting to present both solutions
| he was fiddling on his phone and when asked his thoughts after my
| presentation, just replied "yeah, it's fine".
| nine_zeros wrote:
| I have been through this. Learn from my experience. If someone
| else has an alternative proposal, ask THEM to write it down for
| you to consider.
|
| No one is allowed to propose something without first proving
| that they did the homework or that there is a need to even
| consider what they are thinking.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Well, it worked.
|
| Key is to find minimum required effort.
| arafalov wrote:
| Had to search a couple of them (extropian and widow's son). Also,
| I had the whitepaper one thrown at me several times. Maybe I will
| use it myself next time.
|
| My own contribution would be: *) This would violate Accessibility
| requirements
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Maybe I will use it myself next time.
|
| It's easier to just not be wrong /s
| arafalov wrote:
| Sometimes, one can lose technical arguments on non-technical
| reasons. It is good to have options. :-)
| karmakaze wrote:
| +1 as a checklist. There's a good number of points on this list
| that if true when said are good actual considerations. Maybe not
| enough to change the outcome but worthwhile nonetheless.
| kinduff wrote:
| That last one made be lol'd. How do you even respond to that?
| oever wrote:
| Yes, it only has minor issues.
| nescioquid wrote:
| "I'm an iOS user" might be a good try.
| tester756 wrote:
| * It'll be more performant
| shrimpx wrote:
| This could be named "Things to say to defuse the overeducated
| clueless self-entitled newb who is toxically ramming his lame
| ideas into the team" :-)
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| And then...I looked in the mirror! :-)
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I don't that the list insinuates that the listed concerns are
| usually specious.
|
| It seems like an underhanded way to stifle technical debate.
| testudovictoria wrote:
| The archived page is pulled from
| http://www.skirsch.com/humor/techarg.htm. There's some merit to
| some of these, but it's not a serious list.
| warent wrote:
| I think the whole thing is tongue in cheek.
|
| You used to program in Pascal, didn't you?
| justinlloyd wrote:
| And we're an all-FORTH shop so it'll never scale beyond the
| undergrad project I got a D in.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Is Pascal really considered a second-class language in the
| industry so using it in the past is some disreputable act? I
| notice some level of condescension to the language itself from
| time to time, but surely it's a valid experience, or am I wrong?
| Hope it's just some thing from the 2001.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >using it in the past is some disreputable act?
|
| we all had to take a basic programming class at the beginning
| too, but that was like when moses was a baby cruising down the
| river.
|
| do beginning programming classes still start with BASIC/Pascal?
| i'm assuming boot camps don't, but do typical programming
| classes skip over them entirely too now?
| damnedspot wrote:
| Both my high school and undergrad intro courses used Java.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The "start programing" courses tend to start with Pyhton, the
| "we train professionals" ones tend to start with Java or C#,
| and the academic ones vary between C, Python, Java or
| Haskell.
|
| I don't think people learn Pascal nowadays. And basic
| (whatever capitalization, prefix or suffix you add) is dead.
| [deleted]
| tickthokk wrote:
| > We need this to fit on a single floppy.
|
| Giving this a go on my next argument XD
| klyrs wrote:
| Food for thought... if more websites fit on floppies, they'd be
| practically 3g-friendly.
| diskzero wrote:
| _I don 't have time for this extropian nonsense._
|
| Help! Can someone explain this one to me, just so I can use it
| with some context.
| layer8 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism
| I_complete_me wrote:
| A former boss of mine used to use the word "intermercunian" as
| in : "I went to a meeting and this fellow said X, Y and Z"
| which, in fairness, was pretty intermercuinan of him."
| Naturally, I nodded in knowing agreement...
| willismichael wrote:
| Isn't this the joke? Almost nobody knows what extropian means,
| but when you're arguing with a blowhard they won't want to
| admit it and look stupid in front of other people.
| adwn wrote:
| I don't get it. Some items on that list can be legitimate, non-
| technical objections, like 3, 5, 7, 30, 31, 33, 56, 58. Others
| can be legitimate, _technical_ objections, like 1, 6, 19, 46.
| csours wrote:
| Anything can be a legitimate objection. At some point you have
| to just try something.
| adwn wrote:
| That's terrible advice if the objection is of legal nature,
| for example, or when human safety is at stake. Also, you
| typically don't have unlimited resources, so "you just have
| to try something" isn't a good justification if there valid
| objections against its feasibility.
| csours wrote:
| Yes, advice without context is terrible. Any objection can
| be a good or bad objection based on context.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| All of them can be legitimate. It's just that they almost never
| are.
| ydnaclementine wrote:
| > Look, would you just get off your Be obsession for FIVE MINUTES
| and talk serious design with us?
|
| I get the rest of the references, but what is a Be obsession?
| Also the last one is gold
| mgbelisle wrote:
| Be OS is the reference I believe
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
| loudmax wrote:
| That would be BeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
|
| Put out of business by everyone's favorite monopolist, but to
| some extent it lives on as Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org/
| diskzero wrote:
| It also lives on in the work of BeOS engineers who
| infiltrated Apple: Tracker -> Finder, BeFS -> Matador,
| Spotlight, MediaKit -> Final Cut Pro, various media libraries
| and more. Possibly a lot of the C++ work we did at Apple
| after leaving Be has been purged, but some still lives!!!
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I saw some DNA from Gobe Productive, the Be
| answer to AppleWorks, lurking in iWorks. (Which is kind of
| recursive, since Gobe was created by most of the original
| AppleWorks team after ClarisWorks' demise, IIRC, who were
| then hired by Apple after Gobe's demise...)
|
| > BeFS -> Matador
|
| Was Matador a code name for APFS, or is this something else
| entirely?
| diskzero wrote:
| Matador became Spotlight, but lives on in processes that
| take over your CPU when you least want them to; mdworker,
| mds, etc.
| codyb wrote:
| Wow ClarisWorks. That's a throw back. That was around the
| time of Quark Express I think?
|
| Pops was a graphic designer so got to grow up with that
| evolution and consolidation of the various programs that
| all eventually were either subsumed or put out of
| business by Adobe (and I guess MS).
| alex_anglin wrote:
| BeOS[1] was an OS at the time that by many accounts had good
| user experience. Didn't achieve commercial success though.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
| [deleted]
| cheese_van wrote:
| My section's inside joke was to tell management that whatever
| network failure of the day we were experiencing was attributable
| to "artifacts".
|
| "The artifact may have dependencies and we're analyzing those
| now, Sir." Especially useful when you've upgraded and it all goes
| to hell.
|
| Those damned artifacts will get you every time.
| [deleted]
| anon776 wrote:
| #71: This appears to be brittle
| bshimmin wrote:
| > Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking.
|
| I really like this one - would anyone care to make a suggestion
| for a modern replacement for Windows NT here? Perl 6, perhaps?
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(page generated 2021-11-05 23:01 UTC)