[HN Gopher] Flow Manifest(o)
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       Flow Manifest(o)
        
       Author : alexzeitler
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2023-02-12 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (flowmanifest.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (flowmanifest.org)
        
       | lkrubner wrote:
       | I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need
       | a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many
       | movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and
       | ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way to actually
       | achieve simplicity and commonsense?
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | I am a fan of making sure each process is necessary to solve a
         | specific problem encountered by this organization, and then
         | periodically revisiting each process to see if the organization
         | still has the problem it addresses.
        
         | beefman wrote:
         | Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy
         | task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary...
         | and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by
         | credentials and ridiculous interviews...
         | 
         | Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of
         | merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to
         | problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those
         | problems can be mitigated
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952
        
           | lmm wrote:
           | > Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's
           | better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be
           | mitigated
           | 
           | Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that
           | actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any
           | metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the
           | suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric
           | private, changing it over time) seem to point in the
           | direction of actually not having a metric and relying on
           | human judgement instead.
        
         | ilumanty wrote:
         | It's capitalization that turns a pure idea into a bureaucratic
         | nightmare. Other than making someone pay for courses and
         | certificates, how would they prove that they have achieved
         | wisdom? /s
        
         | 1attice wrote:
         | The problem with 'commonsense' is that it's neither a sense,
         | nor terribly common. It is, rather, that sweet spot where
         | intuitions are useful.
         | 
         | Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you
         | are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are
         | accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained
         | against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule
         | you don't feel in your bones.
         | 
         | There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice
         | that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another.
         | For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad
         | intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g.
         | commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work
         | -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because
         | you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much
         | experience in running a country.
         | 
         | An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition
         | cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and
         | algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive',
         | because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent
         | and/or offtopic intuitions.
         | 
         | Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the
         | training corpus of most people does not include examples of
         | sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and
         | hoping for the best.
         | 
         | There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum
         | afficionados try anyway ;D
        
       | matonias wrote:
       | Ponzi?
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | You laugh, but there is a certification very similar to this,
         | except it isn't a parody, and requires you to make sure all
         | your suppliers have the certification.
         | 
         | One give away that a company is certified is that it forces
         | them to block merging of all unreviewed pull requests
         | (including ones that were revised after last review).
        
           | mahopa wrote:
           | Definitely not laughing, the Agile Industrial Complex kills
           | souls.
        
         | mahopa wrote:
         | Parody
        
       | airtonix wrote:
       | [dead]
        
       | joaonmatos wrote:
       | I love that this website is just Wordpress with the default 2020
       | theme. Even I did more CSS tweaking when I was building out a
       | business site for my father.
        
         | e12e wrote:
         | They might want to enable caching?
         | 
         | http://web.archive.org/web/20230212185150/https://flowmanife...
        
       | nickpeterson wrote:
       | Every company I've ever worked at talked about how new hires
       | should be familiar with agile and scrum, and then proceeded to
       | completely ignore either. Then hire coaches to try and make it
       | happen and it didn't.
       | 
       | It not a knowledge problem, it's a culture problem.
        
         | beders wrote:
         | Culture eats processes for lunch.
         | 
         | It is incredibly frustrating to join a new team, point out the
         | very obvious misalignment between agile and what they are
         | doing...
         | 
         | and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of
         | that same culture.
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-12 23:00 UTC)