[HN Gopher] Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that nev...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened
       (2001) [pdf]
        
       Author : Jtsummers
       Score  : 197 points
       Date   : 2024-02-22 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (web.mit.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (web.mit.edu)
        
       | Jtsummers wrote:
       | Only previous submission that had a discussion (and it's worth
       | reading through):
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820 - Jan 24, 2015 (50
       | comments)
        
       | ghaff wrote:
       | In about that same timeframe, Y2K is also really good example.
       | Nothing of note really happened. But if people had just ignored
       | it a lot of things probably would have.
        
         | rhcom2 wrote:
         | Another example is ozone depletion.
        
           | ender341341 wrote:
           | yeah, I've had that discussion
           | 
           | "we were all worried about the ozone and nothing happened,
           | this is just a repeat and people will stop talking about it
           | any time now"
           | 
           | and my response is "'Nothing' happened because the
           | governments acted fast and turned it around so now it's
           | mostly just boring stuff like catching some factoryy that
           | decides to go cheap and use banned chemicals to save a buck"
        
         | gumby wrote:
         | This is a very important case. There was an enormous investment
         | in fixing Y2K, starting long before the day in question (e.g.
         | financial instruments with expiration dates after Y2K had to be
         | fixed before they became due), so on the day there was only a
         | smattering of minor residual bugs.
         | 
         | There were a few jokes about it in the newspapers but by and
         | large the public just ignored it.
         | 
         | I work on climate and hope / hoped that the same would happen,
         | but it's looking like it will soon get everybody's attention
         | regardless.
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | _> I work on climate and hope  / hoped that the same would
           | happen, but it's looking like it will soon get everybody's
           | attention regardless._
           | 
           | Unfortunately those fixes are slated for Humanity 2.0, _Homo
           | extinctus_.
        
           | mcdonje wrote:
           | Y2K would negatively impact companies' bottom lines if not
           | dealt with, directly, in a short and known timeline, in
           | predictable ways.
           | 
           | Climate change will impact companies in different ways at
           | different times. Oil companies, for instance, are
           | incentivized to ramp up production as much as possible while
           | also diversifying.
           | 
           | The way to get all companies to take appropriate actions is
           | to not allow them to externalize costs. That means a
           | significant carbon tax.
        
           | konfusinomicon wrote:
           | I'm sure I'm not the only one that can't wait for the 2038
           | problem to get closer. bank accounts gonna be jumping like a
           | 3-peat Micheal Jordan when those consultation fee checks
           | start rolling in.. provided the Boston Dynamics dogs haven't
           | taken over yet
        
             | jcadam wrote:
             | Java EE will be the COBOL of 2037...
        
           | nsxwolf wrote:
           | The mitigations were done so well today the public remembers
           | Y2K as a "scam".
        
             | ghaff wrote:
             | I suspect most people don't even remember a 25-year ago
             | non-event as anything.
        
         | UniverseHacker wrote:
         | What, what do you mean nothing happened? I'm in my underground
         | bunker, do you think it would be safe to come out and look
         | around?
         | 
         | You guys are all in your Y2K underground bunkers still, right?
        
           | captainbland wrote:
           | Yeah, it's the year 24, don't worry about it. A human is
           | probably still able to type this.
        
           | Smoosh wrote:
           | My advice looking back over the past 25 years . . . stay in
           | the bunker.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | I didn't worry. Even took a trip to a different country.
           | Though I can totally understand why some people (know you're
           | joking) might have played it more conservatively.
        
         | HankB99 wrote:
         | Yeah. I've heard folk who should know better (looking at you,
         | John C. Dvorak) call Y2K a nothingburger and suggest the effort
         | to prevent problems was a total boondoggle.
         | 
         | Disclaimer: I was part of that effort. The funny thing was that
         | I was brought back to a previous client to fix something that
         | my previous efforts had literally caused. Took me 20 minutes to
         | fix it once I saw what the problem was. And then there was a
         | "while you're here, can you take a look at this ..." That
         | lasted about two years until they closed the department and
         | moved it to NY, NY.
         | 
         | At least I got credit in terms of billable hours.
        
           | ghaff wrote:
           | While I often enjoyed reading Dvorak columns in PCMag, he was
           | always more someone who liked to provoke people than offer
           | thoughtful commentary.
        
         | Justsignedup wrote:
         | the readiness paradox:
         | 
         | If you are prepared, nothing interesting happens, life moves
         | on, people opened a notebook and pressed a few buttons.
         | 
         | If you are not prepared, the texas grid freezes, people die,
         | people lose their savings, and "nobody could have imagined it
         | would be this bad".
        
           | nonrandomstring wrote:
           | Recommend "Left of Bang"
           | 
           | In strategic sysadmin and cybersecurity this is staple
           | thinking, and a useful part of what I teach now.
           | 
           | Problem for vigilant thinkers is the rewards, as explained in
           | TFA, are perverse.
           | 
           | People are content with technology to be magical. They don't
           | see the millions of people quietly repairing it and planning
           | to keep it all going smoothly.
           | 
           | To "bosses" cybersecurity only bring them problems, and cost
           | them money apparently doing nothing. The same for any defence
           | force, until you need it.
           | 
           | Did some nice interviews for international sysadmin day last
           | summer [1].
           | 
           | [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22663095-left-of-bang
           | 
           | [1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=15
        
         | aksss wrote:
         | Not "probably". I was involved at ground level fixing code for
         | BP in '98. Can say without a doubt that bad things would have
         | happened. And not because my salary depended on it - there was
         | no shortage of opportunities to work on other things,
         | obviously. It was legitimately an issue that would have
         | crippled the energy industry (major players, and all their
         | many, many dependents). I infer from this experience that the
         | impact would have been the same on many other industries (e.g.
         | finance, resource development) directly and indirectly.
         | 
         | But it is a great example. I still run into people who recall
         | Y2K as an example of much ado about nothing. No, no!! It wasn't
         | an issue for you because many people worked hard to prevent the
         | problems.
         | 
         | Those problems were not terribly complex just pervasive and
         | critical, requiring a high LOE. It wasn't like a huge moon-
         | landing engineering problem to be held up as some
         | accomplishment of humanity, more akin fixing a lot of dumb
         | Challenger o-ring problems before a blow-up.
        
       | pintxo wrote:
       | Or: The Preparedness paradox [1] / "There is no glory in
       | prevention"
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
        
       | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
       | Another variation on the problem is the over-allocation of
       | resources to preventing problems which actually happened once,
       | versus those that are more severe but haven't happened yet.
       | 
       | This is a management problem, because no-one wants to be
       | accountable for a repeat incident even if it was rational to be
       | working on something else more important.
        
         | thfuran wrote:
         | There's a ton of reactionary legislation on the books that
         | exists pretty much entirely because politicians wanted to be
         | seen doing something. It's mostly crap.
        
           | NovemberWhiskey wrote:
           | Yeah, the legendary politician's fallacy:
           | 
           | 1) We must do something.
           | 
           | 2) This is something.
           | 
           | 3) Therefore, we must do this.
        
             | wolverine876 wrote:
             | I thought that was the voter's fallacy.
        
             | shoo wrote:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | This is probably a bit too cynical; it's not just
           | "politicians who want to be seen doing something"; the public
           | often wants something done as well. And "we didn't do
           | anything after that incident from ten years ago and now it
           | happened again" is not a good look. Complex stories about
           | trade-offs and the cure being worse than the disease often
           | don't "play well" in the media, especially not with the
           | opposition demanding that "something could have been done!"
           | And corporations tend to be pathologically risk-averse.
           | 
           | Politicians, the media, corporations, and the public all have
           | a part in this.
        
             | thfuran wrote:
             | >the public often wants something done as well.
             | 
             | Sure, that's why the politicians want to be seen doing it.
             | But the legislative focus is often on getting something
             | passed now while it's a hot issue rather than on eventually
             | getting a good bill passed (let alone deciding that we
             | actually already have the correct amount of legislation on
             | the topic).
        
           | solidsnack9000 wrote:
           | A lot of gun legislation is like this. Whatever your view of
           | guns is, there is no rationale for a "safe hand gun roster"
           | like California's where the Glock 17 Gen 3 is on it, but the
           | Gen 5 -- which introduces a basic safety improvement for
           | left-handed people -- is not.
        
         | brazzy wrote:
         | The thing is: it's very easy to play up the likelihood and
         | severity of problems that are entirely imaginary. This can be
         | just a bad habit, but also a deliberate tactic. In either case,
         | a lot of effort, time, money, etc. is wasted.
         | 
         | Waiting for something to actually happen before allocating
         | resources to preventing it is (to some degree) a rational
         | policy.
        
           | cpill wrote:
           | yeah that to the Ai doomers who are making six figures off of
           | it
        
             | Vecr wrote:
             | The argument there is that waiting for "it" to happen would
             | be way too late. Especially if "it" is a billion people are
             | dead and the rest of the people don't have much time.
        
         | Pet_Ant wrote:
         | > Another variation on the problem is the over-allocation of
         | resources to preventing problems which actually happened once,
         | versus those that are more severe but haven't happened yet.
         | 
         | I've heard this called "institutional scarring" in a blog post
         | somewhere. The idea is a small wound can be replaced with tough
         | inflexible tissue. The jist of the blog post was that just
         | because something happened, doesn't mean you have to change
         | things to ensure it never happens again because that can be an
         | over-reaction that really burdens your future. Accept that loss
         | and that it just might happen again, but that may be better
         | than onerously preventing it with certainty.
        
       | thefatboy wrote:
       | just aint true if you file a bug report
        
       | nomel wrote:
       | In our org, this was brought up. People who had problems, then
       | fixed them, were the ones being seen and recognized by higher
       | level management, and awarded for fixing the problems, when they,
       | often, _shouldn 't_ have happened in the first place.
       | 
       | Now we have something akin to a "person that prevents problems"
       | award. It's a nice gesture, but, even though I received one, I
       | think it's mostly nonsense. You don't get the face
       | time/experience presenting with the higher level managers. It's
       | almost impossible to prove that you prevented catastrophes, by
       | working extra hours, or doing the right thing. Nobody likes a
       | "Hey look, I told you so!" sort of perspective, no matter how
       | it's framed.
       | 
       | To me, this is the most gratification-limiting aspect of being a
       | software engineer: time is required to test quality of
       | foresight/design. Rewarding retroactively, for great past
       | decisions, doesn't happen. There are systems I designed, when
       | making a pittance for compensation, that's still being used a
       | decade later, across multiple companies, almost entirely
       | unmodified. That, _now objectively_ , good work wasn't seen or
       | recognized by anyone paying me at the time, and can't be seen by
       | anyone now. I burned good time for a "good job me!" as a reward.
       | As I get older, that mental masturbation seems less desirable,
       | since it's usually at the expense of the surprisingly limited
       | life credits that we _spend_ on those tasks. But along with most
       | other nerds, I can hardly stop myself because it 's an _innate_
       | obsession.
        
       | esafak wrote:
       | This happens in organizations that don't measure and respect
       | precursors or _leading indicators_ of success /failure --
       | organizations that do not practice organizational observability,
       | to coin a phrase. Which is to say, most of them, because this is
       | not something one thinks of until one has suffered its absence.
       | Your managers have to think like SREs, and be technically
       | sophisticated enough to model and address this problem.
       | 
       | Does anyone know any great management books on this subject?
        
         | diatone wrote:
         | This is a great insight, the idea that management has to look
         | at leading indicators for the org itself. Makes me think that
         | beyond line management, a manger's job is to behave as an
         | investor and steward of the org, instead of getting involved in
         | the details.
         | 
         | Not a management book per se, but Working Backwards popularised
         | an Amazon approach of thinking about the organisation in terms
         | of mechanisms. You might find that useful.
         | 
         | I've always wanted to dig into Scarlet Ink, Dave Anderson's
         | blog, but never have, and I suspect it'll be quite useful for
         | you too.
        
       | hakunin wrote:
       | I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to
       | my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've
       | been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I
       | work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3
       | months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this
       | paradox.
        
         | runamuck wrote:
         | Easy - half a$$ your code and when it breaks - swoop in, "fix
         | things" (actually do it right) and play the role of hero! (I've
         | seen so-called "Rock Stars" at places I worked do this over and
         | over)
        
           | syndicatedjelly wrote:
           | Would you feel good about being that kind of engineer, if the
           | external validation was great enough?
        
             | circusfly wrote:
             | It's OK, the new validation method is AI driven, we're
             | good.
        
             | sodapopcan wrote:
             | When the external validation is monetary then you gotta do
             | what you gotta do.
        
             | tmtvl wrote:
             | There are people with integrity and principles; and then
             | there are people who _can_ pay their rent every month.
        
           | SilasX wrote:
           | Hah, that was in my archetypal description of the fake 10xer,
           | that _somehow_ they are able to swoop in and fix their
           | spaghetti code, come what may, while no one else can make
           | sense of it:
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | Don't do it right, double down on the flaws. You had a 3k
           | SLOC single function (all in main) C program to do something
           | that could be expressed cleanly and clearly in 200 SLOC. Some
           | specific sequence of inputs leads to an error. Instead of
           | tidying it up, removing the repetition that led to the
           | mistake, you copy/paste everything again and add another 100
           | cases to your various switch/case statements (actually you
           | use if/else because switch/case might make things clearer).
           | The specific problem is solved, but in a year another buggy
           | code path will be discovered and you'll have another chance
           | to play hero. In 5 years it'll be 50k SLOC of C all in main,
           | that could have been under 1k SLOC (still all in main). No
           | one else will be able to fix it but you!
        
             | actionfromafar wrote:
             | For extra points, keep the sane solution in a secret source
             | file, then implement a compiler which generates the
             | obfuscated spaghetti. :-P
        
           | farhanhubble wrote:
           | This is exactly what happens at many software companies.
           | People,sometimes under pressure to meet deadlines, apply
           | totally crazy fixes to stop one problem and create new
           | problems.
        
           | sharess wrote:
           | Another option is to work at a consultancy where you hop
           | aboard a new customer project every 3-6 months. Approach
           | every customer as an opportunity to do some resume-driven
           | development and pick a bunch of untested new technologies to
           | experiment with. Be sure to do at least a couple of
           | presentations to tell everyone about the hottest new things
           | you are doing to bring value to the customers. Leave the
           | project once it slowly starts sinking and then just keep
           | hopping from customer to customer. You will be far away once
           | the sea water starts coming through the windows and the non-
           | technical people directing these projects will never figure
           | out what you did.
           | 
           | I have seen that this is one of the most efficient ways to
           | advance your career especially in larger consultancy
           | companies with hundreds or thousands of different customers.
        
           | ponector wrote:
           | It is more easy: do your job right, but do not comment, fix
           | or somehow improve work of your colleagues. Let them fail,
           | aknowledge failure and only then come with fix, get all
           | praise.
           | 
           | Never point to the possible issues at the code reviews,
           | retirement refinements etc.
        
           | godelski wrote:
           | I don't think you're wrong, but god what a waste of time.
           | Can't we just fix the actual problem?
        
           | Scoundreller wrote:
           | don't even need to half a$$ it, just use timebombs.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_bomb_(software)
           | 
           | Usually only works if you're the only dev, unless you get
           | creative with counters like the original devs that made some
           | nice cash fixing it all for y2k
           | 
           | (officially: don't do this)
        
           | darth_avocado wrote:
           | That's literally how promo packs work in FAANG (minus the N)
           | and other adjacent tech companies.
        
           | samstave wrote:
           | For i in employment ensure there is someone who checks in
           | with me every month when they read this line of code, else,
           | stop code from running so they come to me.
        
         | ortusdux wrote:
         | See also: The Locksmith's Paradox -
         | https://medium.com/@pk.patrick.kelly/the-locksmith-paradox-6...
        
           | Pikamander2 wrote:
           | "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done
           | anything at all."
        
             | quickthrower2 wrote:
             | There is a quote about the job being free but you are just
             | paying for the 20 years experience.
             | 
             | The opposite is the lemons market. It is why getting some
             | wet building work done that is actually waterproof is a
             | fucking dark art. Even the pros hiring pros get fucked
             | because the "is waterproof" part is invisible.
        
         | wolverine876 wrote:
         | Life and its rewards aren't perfect. Work with honest,
         | intelligent people; genuinely do your best; your days will be
         | much better and the odds will be with you.
        
         | bmacho wrote:
         | > Don't know how to deal with this paradox.
         | 
         | Think that it is the management's fault if they misjudge you.
         | They have the chance to judge you correctly, yet they misjudge
         | you. Their fault entirely.
        
         | somethoughts wrote:
         | One approach to showing value is as follows:
         | 
         | 1.) Create a spreadsheet with all of the features of your
         | group's/company's products(s) listed in rows.
         | 
         | 2.) Create a column for every team member in the group and
         | highlight the lead developers for each feature.
         | 
         | 3.) Then ask each team member to add a checkmark in their
         | column for every feature for which they would be willing to be
         | on hook for 24x7 triage pager duty.
         | 
         | Over the long term - the most valuable contributor(s) on the
         | team will be the one(s) with the most checkmarks next to the
         | features they led development on (i.e. they write
         | understandable code and document well) combined with the most
         | checkmarked rows in their column (i.e. they proactively seek to
         | understand other peoples codebases).
        
           | cutemonster wrote:
           | Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to
           | avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler
           | features, and get more checkmarks
           | 
           | What if the table in fact shows which people are best at
           | dodging the hard work
           | 
           | Combined with showing who has the most friends in the office
           | (giving checkmarks to features built by one's friends)
        
             | godelski wrote:
             | > Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want
             | to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler
             | features, and get more checkmarks
             | 
             | This is kinda a well known phenomena in medicine[0]. Same
             | with lawyers. I'm just reminded of this scene from Silicon
             | Valley[1]. It's messed up and why everyone needs to be very
             | careful with metrics and remember that metrics are only
             | guides, not targets.
             | 
             | [0]
             | https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/doctors-
             | avoi...
             | 
             | [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0
        
           | FridgeSeal wrote:
           | Kind of ignores the risk externalities have on projects no?
           | If you tried your best to deliver something, but another
           | teams priorities changed, or the business/market shifted, or
           | the project got bogged down in planning/politics outside of
           | that team members control, or if the team needs to integrate
           | with a system (external or legacy) that's out of their
           | control and is notoriously flaky and torpedoes their velocity
           | and morale.
        
         | hackerlight wrote:
         | Really good bosses make up for this. They push teamwork and
         | collaboration, but at the same time they know the details of
         | what every individual is doing and how they each contribute to
         | the whole, and they can ~accurately
         | compensate/promote/terminate. This prevents demoralization of
         | team members. Team members psychologically need to be
         | recognized for their individual contribution.
         | 
         | These bosses tend to be competent ICs who became team leads,
         | they are best positioned to judge the ICs they manage because
         | they themselves are masters at the craft.
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | Modern "agile" systems don't work well with you. They want you
         | to deliver X points of features in 2 weeks. Sounds like you'd
         | be better off as a consultant? But then you need to do all that
         | biz dev stuff! Or find a great CTO to work for (or be the CTO)
         | who understands. You only need one job.
        
         | baxtr wrote:
         | I think an underrated way to deal with this phenomenon is
         | proper self-marketing. Talk endlessly what you have done to
         | prevent catastrophe. Describe the avoided catastrophes vividly
         | so that people get a clear picture.
        
           | mcbishop wrote:
           | Better yet, be in a work culture where people happily give
           | credit to and praise others.
        
           | nhumrich wrote:
           | Sometimes you can't quantify actual avoided things. For
           | example you can't prove that a regulation stove actually
           | prevented what could have been a kitchen fire.
        
         | mattgreenrocks wrote:
         | Work for yourself. The fewer bugs you create, the faster you
         | iterate. And the faster you iterate, the better your chances of
         | finding product/market fit.
        
         | atleastoptimal wrote:
         | The solution is to be a shameless self-marketer of all the work
         | you do.
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | Value is in the eye of the beholder is what I discover. Got to
         | play the game.
         | 
         | If you are an IC, you play it up with the right people. Those
         | right people fight for you instead of the other way around.
         | When the "we need to cut the fat" talks come around, suddenly
         | you are not on the chopping block. But that also assumes the
         | people fighting for you are not on the chopping block.
         | 
         | Soft skills across the industry is highly under valued. Knowing
         | when to pick a fight or hold your tongue is also important (ie,
         | reading the room).
         | 
         | I hate it but you got to do what you got to do to get that
         | cheddar
        
         | ajmurmann wrote:
         | Or worse: People get stuck quite frequently and ask you for
         | help pretty quickly. You get everyone unstuck, but your own
         | work falls behind and when your boss's boss asks for metrics on
         | developers you have few points delivered and few LOC changed.
         | Your boss tries to explain, but your head is the one that rolls
         | next when layoffs happen.
        
         | welder wrote:
         | Quit your job and work for yourself.
        
       | bluGill wrote:
       | I always get cynical when I see awards for software releases.
       | Someone always gets an award for staying up late to fix a last
       | minute problem. Normally the person that should have written good
       | code in the first place so they wouldn't have had to come in
       | late. The award should go to the person (likely people) who never
       | got called in at all in the first place because we didn't find a
       | bug in their code.
        
       | coldtea wrote:
       | Except TSA security theater. They see their budgets grow and seen
       | as essential, for preventing problems that never happened.
       | 
       | But in this case, if those problems were to happen, they wouldn't
       | be stopped by their measures.
        
       | seaourfreed wrote:
       | The opposite. Department heads get fired for allowing blow-ups in
       | their area, that should have been avoided. "Getting credit" means
       | keeping the job managing the department via preventing problems.
        
       | datadrivenangel wrote:
       | This may be one of the biggest challenges facing human
       | civilization. Climate Change, Financial Bubbles, etc.
        
       | circusfly wrote:
       | Volvo probably is an exception in the car world.
        
       | crestfallen wrote:
       | My memory is a bit hazy but it's a good story.
       | 
       | At one place, there was some important order processing taking
       | place. As is fairly typical, couldn't rely on getting all the
       | required info. Or critically, getting all the required info
       | _correctly_. Some extra data, slightly missing pieces but enough
       | to work, etc. etc. Some could be pretty gross. We built
       | validation to massage some inputs, modify processing, what have
       | you to address as many of those as we could think of. The team
       | put in some metrics to identify which validations were
       | "triggered" for each order. Neat. If we'd add more, we'd add a
       | date to it.
       | 
       | It was great. We reported those stats so anyone could see
       | anytime, but we'd also send out some comms about it every now and
       | then. It also helped tremendously when a coworker or customer or
       | whoever would say "Oh no! What happens if XYZ?" and we'd say no
       | worries, we already addressed it, and we prevented #### orders
       | from getting stuck for XYZ.
       | 
       | It showed that the team was thoughtful, that we were invested in
       | making this work, that work needed to _continue_ to keep things
       | running smoothly, and we had data to back that up.
       | 
       | Really helped switch the conversation in the org because folks
       | could see it. If someone pointed out that we hadn't thought of
       | something, it honestly was more about what do we do vs. why
       | didn't we think of this. (Yes, there is a comment here about poor
       | org thinking or blame culture, but some of that exists
       | everywhere.) More proactive. Recognition of preventive quality.
       | People gave us accolades and it bubbled up to some good and real
       | recognition at higher levels too.
       | 
       | I'm mangling the words here a bit but I hope you get the idea.
        
       | nick_m wrote:
       | Great article, and much of this resonates - but what template has
       | been used here? It looks like it was created using LATEX.
        
       | sudosteph wrote:
       | Reminds me of a place I used to work. Every time they asked for
       | feedback, my refrain was "nothing here gets prioritized without a
       | PIR (post-incident response)". Towards the end of my time there,
       | whenever a PIR-related ticket showed up, I would mark it as a
       | duplicate of whatever actual ticket I had dying in the backlog
       | that would have prevented it. It really hurt team morale to have
       | no influence in preventing foreseeable issues in our domain area.
       | Most of the rest of the team had even stopped suggesting
       | improvements altogether because management refused to let us pull
       | our own tickets in.
        
       | acheron wrote:
       | I don't get credit for my tiger-repelling rock even though we
       | haven't seen any tigers.
        
         | qorrect wrote:
         | Are these magic rocks for sale?
        
       | jgeada wrote:
       | Reminds me of this cartoon (which I have posted on my office):
       | https://naksecurity.medium.com/the-detriments-of-hero-cultur...
       | 
       | This is why in many corporate cultures it pays not to proactively
       | stop a problem that you know how to fix _if_ the problem is not
       | in your immediate problem area. Let it be noticed, let it become
       | someone else 's emergency, then fix it. Much better path to a
       | reward that way. Of course, you should also be planning to leave
       | said organization, in the long run it won't do well.
        
       | reaperducer wrote:
       | _Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened
       | (2001) [pdf]_
       | 
       | I'm reminded of this every time I see some YouTuber or other
       | social media click bait claiming that the Y2K bug was no big
       | deal.
       | 
       | The reason it was no big deal is because thousands of graybeards,
       | like myself, stayed up many long nights for months ahead of time
       | making sure things would work.
       | 
       | I still remember the tension during the countdown to midnight
       | UTC. Then the tension rising again during the countdown to
       | Eastern time. Then once more at local time.
       | 
       | Only when it was 2000 in Pacific did we unclench our cheeks.
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | I still don't quite buy that. Surely it's because computers
         | mostly use epoch time for dates, not dd/mm/yy?
         | 
         | Guess we'll find out in 2038.
        
           | contact9879 wrote:
           | Now they do at least
        
           | xcv123 wrote:
           | Many old programs written last century did not use epoch
           | time.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#On_1_January.
           | ..
        
       | woutersf wrote:
       | I call these problems ticking time bombs. This way business has a
       | catchy name to use for the thing they dont understand, its also
       | very clear this needs to be looked at.
        
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       (page generated 2024-02-22 23:00 UTC)