_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
HTML Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]
thelastgallon wrote 27 min ago:
Doing nothing at work: [1] The first comment is spot on. [2] : Time and
time again at many companies, including well-reputed ones, I have seen
that preventing issues gets you no recognition, but building a giant
pile of kindling and then putting out the inevitable fire will get you
recognition twice. Even in "good" orgs.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48442880
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496420
smolder wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
Yeah, I have fixed issues that could have potentially destroyed the
company I was working at. There was an instance of a lazily written
script which just took user input for a file open. It could read
sensitive files on the system because of lazy development. The other
devs praised me for fixing it, but I didn't get any recognition
comparable to the losses our company could have had if it got
exploited.
AndrewChamp wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
"When you things right, no one will ever know you did anything at all"
- Futurama
abustamam wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
This is interesting because you can't prove you prevented something
from happening. It never happened after all. Hank Green has an
interesting video on preventative measures are often unsung, because
how do you know? [1] Kids in Africa who would have otherwise died from
measles, but didn't get measles in the first place because some people
decided to fund and make vaccines and thousands of unnamed and
unrecognized volunteers helped distribute and administer these
vaccines...
These kids are alive and they don't even know that they wouldn't be
alive if it weren't for some people they may never meet, and whose
names they'll never know.
Also tangentially, reminds me of an excerpt of a book called The
Trigger Effect I read as a kid, which said something along the lines
of, when you use your car's brakes to prevent an accident, your life
depends on whoever assembled the brakes and quality controlled them.
You'll never know their name, and they'll never know that they saved
your life.
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/ndeB_BpsRGk?is=03lR2DMyhfwkT3L-
kouru225 wrote 11 hours 37 min ago:
Hikaru Nakamura had a good comment on famous chess moves like this: All
the famous chess moves are famous sacrifices, genius saves, and last
minute checkmates, but when you plug the games into stockfish you find
out that these scenarios only happened cause the players made a series
of awful moves early on in the game
Root_Access wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
This is true but if you remove the need for credit then you can just
get back to work and not have to create a category about it.
nostrademons wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
The headline is only half true. A more accurate rendition might be
"Transactions don't happen because you fixed a problem that never
occurred."
That illustrates the converse. People will absolutely try to avoid
future problems if they are the ones that bear the consequences for
them. Use birth control (or put your kid on it) so you don't have to
raise another child for 20+ years. Don't hang out with that volatile
"friend" who always seems to be having another crisis. Fix your roof
so you don't lose the house. Don't go into debt because you're the one
who will be paying interest on it.
But almost by definition, bearing the consequences of your own
decisions implies that there's no transaction.
It's interesting and fitting that the article begins with a discussion
of Toyota. People buy Toyotas because they want to avoid problems.
The biggest selling point is reliability; a Toyota's value prop is that
you can keep it for 20 years and you won't have unexpected things go
wrong with it. Toyota has managed to turn this into a sales driver
because they appeal to the self-interest of a buyer who will be living
with the car for 10-20 years. There are thousands of individual
decisions that Toyota makes to avoid problems with their cars, starting
with a very conservative aversion to new technology or anything that is
engineeringly risky. Each individual one is invisible to the customer,
and often comes with significant costs in isolation. But because their
sales driver is "be reliable at all costs" and they've ingrained that
into the culture, they've built an organization that is willing to make
these feature trade-offs for reliability.
Also, an interesting corollary is "Oftentimes, a good life is lived
with few transactions."
amelius wrote 12 hours 24 min ago:
This is why Apple never gets any credits.
pugworthy wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
This brings to mind Neil Rickert's "The Parable of the Two
Programmers", which was published in the ACM SIG Software Engineering
newsletter, January 1985. [1] for the original, or [2] for a reprint.
HTML [1]: https://dl.acm.org/action/showFmPdf?doi=10.1145%2F1012443
HTML [2]: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-progr...
api wrote 13 hours 57 min ago:
Chernobyl instantly comes to mind. The giant problem with that
particular RBMK design was known to a few people, but nobody fixed it,
and if they had... we wouldn't even know, since it would be lost to
history.
Sam6late wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
Here is another take in s different context.I had a very bad manger who
was credited earlier with causing several companies to go out of
business while he was taking advantage of having worked for a FAANG
company. He worked there for less than 6 months as a business
development dude when the that big shot company was new in that
market.After he joined us and when I was processing some payments I
noticed that he was paying some people for 2 months ahead of their
starting dates, it was some $20k.I notified him, and he corrected the
date,then I was told by others in the department that my problem was
that I should not 'interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake'.
Eventually, the company got rid of him but it was after a very serious
damage.
harimau777 wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
I had this problem at a previous job. I spent almost all of my time
taking care of the behind the scenes administrative work (scheduling
meetings, making sure that people had the information they needed to
come into the meetings prepared, etc.). However, when performance
review came around I was told that the only thing that they cared about
was that I hadn't completed many story points because I was too busy
keeping things from falling apart.
So I stopped doing all the administrative work and focused on just
completing story points. A week or two later my manager asks the team
"how come all of our meetings are falling apart now? We get into a
meeting and no one knows what's going on."
projektfu wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
Like what would have happened to the 4077th MASH if Radar O'Reilly
had been reassigned.
-warren wrote 15 hours 40 min ago:
My time in IT has really oscillated between these two extremes:
- "Everything around is working just fine. What are we paying IT for?"
- "Everything is broken. What are we even paying IT for?"
Personally, I strive for the former rather than the latter; I like to
say "If I do my job right, you never know I'm here." But that's what
got me let go.
(and for karma's sake, I keep in touch with folks at the old company;
it's an absolute crapshow. So I got that going for me; which is nice)
matja wrote 16 hours 0 min ago:
Apt comic:
HTML [1]: https://www.workchronicles.com/p/comic-prevention-vs-cure
j3th9n wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
The best hackers are the ones who never get caught.
cameronh90 wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
As Futurama said, when you do things right, people won't be sure you've
done anything at all.
teddyh wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
They stole that from the Tao Te Ching, chapter 17:
When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you donât trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesnât talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, âAmazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!â
â < [1] >
HTML [1]: https://ttc.tasuki.org/section:17
markus_zhang wrote 17 hours 13 min ago:
The title reminds me of an interesting ancient Chinese anecdote. And it
is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some scandals
recently ( [1] ).
King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que:
âOf you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the
healing art?â
Bian Que replied:
âMy eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I,
Bian Que, am the least of the three.â
King Wen said:
âMay I hear why?â
Bian Que answered:
âMy eldest brother sees illness in the spirit, before it has taken
shape, and removes it unseen; therefore his name is known only within
our household.
My second brother treats illness when it is but a hairâs breadth from
appearing; therefore his name does not travel beyond our village lane.
As for me, Bian Que: I pierce the blood vessels, administer strong
medicines, and cut open the flesh. Thus, by such visible acts, my name
has spread among the lords.â
HTML [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo
sirlaser wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
"My eldest brother prevents bugs from appearing before they ever
arise, so his skills are only known to the dev team he's on.
"My second brother casually fixes bugs as soon as they appear, so his
skills are known to the entire tech department.
"As for me, I rush around everyday putting out fires everywhere, so
everyone in the company knows of me."
red-iron-pine wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
> And it is also a bit ironic that Toyota has gotten itself into some
scandals recently ( [1] ).
the article is from June 2024. this is "recently"?
HTML [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo
_caw wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
Yes? Toyota has been producing vehicles since the 30s, so two years
ago is quite recent within context.
valbaca wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
or a simpler version: "A stitch in time saves nine...but I charge by
the stitch"
notJim wrote 11 hours 39 min ago:
literally one of the main reasons america spends so much on
healthcare
sorokod wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
Can you share the source of the anecdote? I tried to find it in
Zhuangzi and was not successful.
vitus wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
Best I can tell, it's originally from Heguanzi:
HTML [1]: https://ctext.org/he-guan-zi/shi-xian
dkga wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
Beautiful text. By the way, I can't thank enough the maintainers
at ctext.org. What a beautiful work they do.
tom2026hn wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
ashirviskas wrote 15 hours 0 min ago:
How many euros or kilograms is it?
jimnotgym wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
I would say in nice round numbers 50 grams prevention for a kilo
of cure. That is my only criticism of the metric system, it
doesn't often coincide with quantities handy for every day use,
so makes poor 'sayings'.
projektfu wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
Three Troy ergs.
t43562 wrote 17 hours 23 min ago:
I recognise almost every aspect of this document - it's exactly what's
so intractable about the software business. This is why I think you do
need to do some programming every now and again no matter what your
level is because otherwise you cannot see what's happening and you'll
be tempted into the "lazy developer" attribution.
arkensaw wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
I feel obliged to point out Stanslav Petrov, who absolutely got credit
for fixing a problem that never happened. Granted it's a very extreme
case.
ekjhgkejhgk wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
Credit only in fame. [1] > Petrov underwent intense questioning by
his superiors about his judgment. Initially, he was praised for his
decision.[2] Colonel-general Yuri Votintsev, the then-commander of
the Soviet Air Defense's Missile Defense Units, who was the first to
hear Petrov's report of the incident (and the first to reveal it to
the public in the 1990s), states that Petrov's "correct actions" were
"duly noted".[2] Petrov himself states he was initially praised by
Votintsev and promised a reward,[2][22] but recalls that he was also
reprimanded for improper filing of paperwork because he had not
described the incident in the war diary.[22][23]
> Petrov has said that he was neither rewarded nor punished for his
actions.[24] According to Petrov, he received no reward because the
incident and other bugs found in the missile detection system
embarrassed his superiors and the scientists who were responsible for
it, so that if he had been officially rewarded, they would have had
to be punished.[2][24][22][23] He was reassigned to a less sensitive
post,[23] took early retirement (although he emphasized that he was
not "forced out" of the army),[22] and suffered a nervous
breakdown.[23]
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov#Aftermath
thx67 wrote 13 hours 17 min ago:
His page links to [1] which is a harrowing thing to read. We keep
rolling the dice with no changes to the game.
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_close_calls
pedroza_alex wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
The same article points out that he received at least £26k in
awards. It could be argued that the reward isn't proportional to
the magnitude of his actions, but it exists.
jdw64 wrote 19 hours 59 min ago:
Avengers get the glory, preventers get no story.
awesome_dude wrote 20 hours 42 min ago:
We know that the squeaky wheel is the one that gets oiled, and we don't
want the wheels to come off, so we need the wheel to squeak loud enough
to be heard ;)
alkonaut wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
This is especially nice in the age of AI. I (the graybeard senior
developer) does all the risky refactoring. I can take a performance
issue and turn it into six regressions in half a day ($100). Then
everyone is impressed when I let Opus fix these regressions in 20
minutes and $2 worth of AI.
No one notices when you cut 20% of some expensive process but cause no
regressions.
afisxisto wrote 21 hours 50 min ago:
I remember finding a comment in the first codebase I ever worked on
professionally in my first ever job.
It read "This fixes a bug that hasn't happened yet".
It seemed really smart at first, but later I learned that the developer
that added that code also had a pattern of appending spaces to the
start and end of user input and comparing the length to 2 to determine
whether the value was empty or not...
So I'm fairly sure "that hasn't happened yet" was probably more a case
of "that I personally haven't introduced unnecessarily yet" :)
coldtea wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
Pendatically speaking, people do get credit for fixing problems that
never happened.
E.g. if the problems are quantifiable and there's a record, like
dropping homicides from 100 per year to 20 per year in a city. Those
extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is understood.
For an one-off problem, it depends on how clear the path to the problem
is. An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big
electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if
the accidents didn't happen.
Steve16384 wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
> An electrician doing an inspection and noticing and fixing big
electrical issues in the installation, would be appreciated, even if
the accidents didn't happen.
Not if nobody knew he'd fixed it.
dormento wrote 15 hours 58 min ago:
> Those extra homicides "didn't happen", but the improvement is
understood.
People are gonna criticize by saying "see? it was an overreaction to
the problem, since there's not been many homicides at all!", when in
fact the homicides were prevented by fixing the original problem.
Same way with the electrician: "how much are you gonna charge again?
And you're charging for a fix to a problem that didn't happen yet?
Nah, I'll call you when the problem happens".
Its maddening.
mihaaly wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
But the same person can get paid for it. So there is an incentive to
create, or at least pretend problems.
doener wrote 22 hours 44 min ago:
Since Covid nearly everyone in Germany knows this saying: "There is no
glory in prevention."
agumonkey wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
And people often get credit for fixing issues they partially created.
Human groups work on shallow signalling and distributed confusion.
WalterBright wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
People do get credit for making things that "just work".
latentframe wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
Prevention is hard to sustain because the success is invisible : nobody
notice the defects delays or crises that never happened
Tsarp wrote 1 day ago:
Ian Rush said it best: "It's best being a striker. Miss five, score the
winner, you're a hero. The goalkeeper plays a blinder, lets one in, and
he's a villain."
Every place I've worked rewards the firefighter over the person who
made sure nothing ever caught fire. And the worst part is the math is
obvious to everyone except the people who set the incentives.
dilyevsky wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
I dont think this comparison really works. Firefighter would be
goalie or a defender and like you said in sports they are less
appreciated/compensated for a simple reason - usually they donât
bring in views. There are exceptions ofc like Pippen or Seaman
joelthelion wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
How would you set the incentives, though? Almost by definition, it's
hard to reward things that aren't visible.
Note that there is also the flip side of the coin, people who spend
all their time worrying about things that never happen, so it's not
like you can just reward a defensive attitude things are more
complicated than that.
forshaper wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
The equivalent of 'days since last injury' bonuses is the first
method that comes to mind, until you consider that this would mean
people would be more likely to hide things going wrong.
So then many things are to rely on executive culture, and an
executive who will walk the line and get their info from people at
the bottom is like a unicorn. That won't scale, but it does work if
you do have such an executive. Naturally they would need a basic
understanding of how supply is created in their firm.
Yet there is something. Toyota Hiluxes and Honda Super Cubs got
popular due to maintenance ease. AK-47s. Miele vacuums. Older
Thinkpads.
What measures would make the human equivalent visible?
an0malous wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
One basic example is not counting bugs as points in your ticket
tracker. At my last job I had coworkers whose velocity was almost
double everyone elseâs but it was because they kept deploying and
then fixing their own bugs.
Tsarp wrote 20 hours 6 min ago:
I dont have an answer and you are mostly correct. I received some
advice based on this that made sense which was to pick the roles in
your career that naturally made it easier. Sales, PM, Dev etc and
not support, Devops, escalation management, CSM etc.
SteveGerencser wrote 1 day ago:
I began migrating from network/hardware/IT work and into marketing
after nearly 2 years of heavy lifting getting ready for Y2K. In the
end, "nothing happened," so all that time and money was wasted,
according to nearly every company I worked with. Even had one demand a
full refund. I agreed as long as I could revert all the work that I had
done. They agreed, and the next day after that their entire system
collapsed.
I couldn't even get my own dad to pay for network support for his
company since he would never pay my rate for anyone no matter what.
After 2 other people failed to solve his problem I fixed it in 15
minutes and then he "really" didn't want to pay because it only took 15
minutes.
I was very good at what I did but got no appreciation for keeping
things from breaking, only for fixing things after they broke.
Marketing paid better, and I could point at real world numbers daily
and justify my pay. I don't like it anywhere near as much, but at least
it gets more respect than any other IT work I did.
atoav wrote 23 hours 20 min ago:
On your dad:
"This is what my regular customers pay me. If I hired one of my
friends or relatives I see it as my duty to pay them at least what
they are worth, this is the way you raised me."
I believe this to be true btw. If someone is really your friend, you
want them to do well and that means you pay what they usually get or
you don't bother them and get someone else.
SteveGerencser wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
I agree. I have never taken a discount from a friend or family
member for work that they do for a living. It never made sense to
me how anyone would want to underpay someone in their family or
close circle of friends. I do however, go out of my way to make
sure that they are charging what they are really worth.
sevenzero wrote 23 hours 39 min ago:
Idk I joined the field only like 5 years ago. Prior to knowing about
programming I had a lot of respect for programmers and tech as it was
this magic world to me. After having joined the field the magic is
completely gone and I don't want to talk to programmers irl anymore
because of how many insufferable people I've met so far.
The parts where I've got credit are the simple things, fix printer,
fix computer issue A,B and C or small apps like an ad free Sudoku for
android which I have built for my friends.
The parts I don't get credit for are the parts I get paid for. But I
can see that in many industries, as soon as money is involved people
are less thankful because they expect you to fulfill your part of the
contract.
Generally people not knowing shit about tech think that devs sit in
HO all day working only 30 minutes. AI didn't help that image.
pulse7 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm sorry your dad didn't respect your IT work...
menaerus wrote 23 hours 8 min ago:
If I move out a bit of my circle, where people do all kinds of
work, I'd say that there's generally a stigma on the "IT" workers.
Moreover the stigma is there even within the IT company/industry
itself, where sales, marketing, non-engineering parts of
management, and other similar types of supporting roles also look
down on the engineering. And this unfortunately includes family
members too. I learned that people are mostly envy but when you're
surrounded by many it can become overwhelming - numerous times I
heard phrases like "oh, you're bricklayers of a modern age" ...
like wtf
forshaper wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
I do think of all my computer work as predominantly janitorial.
inejge wrote 1 day ago:
Couldn't help noticing:
In other words, itâs not just a tool problem, any more than itâs a
human
resources problem or a leadership problem. Instead it is a systemic
problem [...]
Shades of an LLMism, a bit padded, a quarter of a century ago. These
days someone could easily give it a stink-eye. I'm sure that training
has ingested this along with countless similar examples.
teiferer wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
That should really be a cautionary tale for everybody accusing
everyone of LLM manufacturing texts. Many people write like that. The
self-censoring nowadays to try to avoid sounding like an LLM is
really sth we need to grow out of.
ananthrk wrote 1 day ago:
"Titanic effect" - No captain gets credit for preventing a disaster!
insumanth wrote 1 day ago:
Boring is Better
CalChris wrote 1 day ago:
People donât get credit for fixing problems that do happen. Maybe
possibly in a sales scenario where your fix unblocked the sale.
Otherwise nada.
thelastgallon wrote 1 day ago:
This is how people get promoted at work. They break something, it
escalates and gets visibility, emails sent to executives. Now, they
'fix' it, many thank yous from everyone for a job well done. Another
version of this is delay the work you are supposed to do a long time
back and let it gain visibility. Executives are blind, they can't see
work being done by people who take ownership and get shit done before
it becomes a problem. However, executive will remember the name of the
person who breaks shit and 'saves' the day.
doublerabbit wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
The sociopathic backhand. Someone breaks it, blames you, drags your
name through the mud exacerbating the issue, goes to "fix it" yet
makes it worse because of their incompetence. They continue to cuss
you out for it all while licking the arse of the executive. "No, we
better not let doublerabbit touch that", "I don't think they're a
team player". All while it was my infrastructure.
And people ask why I hate humans.
protocolture wrote 1 day ago:
Depends on the business.
When everyone is technical to some degree, I find that credit for
technical rescue is forthcoming.
throwawa1 wrote 1 day ago:
Its called doing your job.
Steve16384 wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
That depends. It might be going above-and-beyond your job.
tinyhouse wrote 1 day ago:
This is very true and applies for everything in life.
cm11 wrote 1 day ago:
I'd guess a lot of people here consider this "reality" at this point.
Has anyone come up with a responseânot a fix for the company or
leaders behaving this way, but a response for their own path?
Did you change from a quiet diligent one to manipulating and playing
the game (now that you know the game)? Did you go from quiet and
diligent to quiet and not diligent (why do good work when meh work does
the trick)? Another path?
sfn42 wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
I just do my job to the best of my ability. I have to change jobs
every couple years anyway to get proper pay bumps, so I don't really
care what the higher ups think of me. The people near me are who I'll
use as references and they generally know I'm great at what I do.
staplers wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...
throw0101c wrote 1 day ago:
Aka:
*
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preparedness_paradox
teiferer wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
My favorite example is the introduction of speed limit on some
accident-ridden stretch of the Autobahn north of Berlin. After
introducing the speed limit, the accident numbers went down
dramatically. What did the local administration decide? Remove the
speed limit again -- cause there were no accidents anymore!
everyone wrote 1 day ago:
The jokes around Y2K being a nothing burger always annoy me. Nothing
happened because a lot of talented people worked their asses off fixing
it.
whatever1 wrote 1 day ago:
I never gave credit to my electricity company for delivering
electricity to me. I only get mad when there is an outage.
blitzar wrote 20 hours 44 min ago:
> I never gave credit to my electricity company
That's what the moneys for ...
jesterson wrote 1 day ago:
Well in a way you do. They send you a fine bill every month and you
do credit some of your allegedly hard earned bucks.
tikhonj wrote 1 day ago:
Counterpoint: I absolutely give credit to Sonic for being a great ISP
and recommend them to everyone. I got my parents to switch when Sonic
finally rolled out to their neighborhood.
If online comments are anything to go by, I'm not alone.
If you're in the Bay Area and you can get a Sonic fiber connection, I
would highly recommend them over AT&T/Comcast/etc.
JimsonYang wrote 1 day ago:
Its either end of the spectrum-you do the best job(top 10%) or your
everyone else.
If you only do middle of the pack(for one reason or another-cost,
talent, etc) you become incentivized to cause problems then fix it.
Thus a net negative to society
*Also recommend sonic-their pricing and service is top tier
m463 wrote 1 day ago:
I think of electric vehicle fires and jet airliner crashes.
Also, telsa self-driving. yes, we know about the greatly publicized
accidents, or the tweets of the founder, but the avoided incidents
not so much.
thx67 wrote 13 hours 50 min ago:
This is where the industry made and continues to make mistakes wrt
autonomous driving.
They should be able to quantitatively say how many crashes were
reduced, avoided and spotted. The autonomous safety system should
be running all the time and it should detect not only issues with
primary vehicle but it should also catalog issues it sees in other
vehicles in its vicinity.
We shouldn't have gotten AD before we got automated crash
avoidance.
projektfu wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
My car (Honda Prologue) is a little bit of a nervous Nellie,
warning me to brake when someone is turning out of my lane, but
it has definitely noticed developing situations many times before
I have.
oenton wrote 58 min ago:
Iâm curious, whatâs an example of a developing situation it
detected for you? I ask because after car pooling with a friend
in their Tesla a few times I can confidently say I would never
trust what Tesla calls FSD. Forget developing situations, there
were some close calls with whatâs immediately in front of it.
Think- about to miss a left turn at 40mph or drive into
construction cones that are blocking a lane. I think Iâd
prefer basic driver assistance over that.
HerbManic wrote 1 day ago:
Just remember, the power grid fails in theory but works in practice.
sandeepkd wrote 1 day ago:
Its really hard to measure effectiveness, problem becomes even harder
when a non-engineering person has the job to measure effectiveness of a
engineering person.
On other hand. for software engineering some of the signals that can be
used to measure such a management itself can be
1. On call requirement, outages and team burnout - A well written
software should not require on-calls from the dev team
2. Ask them about the "concrete" roadmap for next 6 months to a year -
Absence of concrete items is a bad sign
jmyeet wrote 1 day ago:
This is the real problem with performance reviews in companies, which
then feeds into opportunities, promotions and compensation. It's just a
popularity contest. And this is particularly harmful to people who are
neurodivergent, particularly if they're on the autism spectrum, because
neurotypical people, who end up making all these decisions, view such
people negatively for literally no reason.
You could spin up a team of 6 engineers and have them go away and try
some greenfield project. They could come up back in 6 months having
shipped nothing. Which of these descriptions fits the facts?
1. The team learned a lot and ultimately decided there was no
product-market fit and decided it was best to reallocate resources
elsewhere. The learnings from that project will help a whole bunch of
other projects across the division; and
2. They failed to ship and get subpar performance ratings for having no
impact.
The answer is... both. Or either. How you are treated will depend on
how you are viewed by your management chain and that's a social
function. We've all encountered people who never shut up about how hard
their job is. Often they end up solving problems that they created,
often by not listening to anyone that those problems would occur. And
they get credit for it.
You could say to people who anticipate problems to stop because it gets
you nowhere. Let people fail. If only it worked that way. Instead
you'll get blamed for not seeing a problem someone else created because
you're viewed as competent but you aren't liked through no fault of
your own.
Google seems to be the posterchild for a company that briefly solved
this problem and then forgot what made them successful. I am referring
to Project aristotle [1], which ultimately determined that
psychological safety was the key ingredient in a team's success.
Now amplify all of this with constant rounds of layoffs where the
environment isn't just for pay bumps and opportunities but where the
cost of failing is losing your income. What you've created is an
environment where office politics is everything.
[1]
HTML [1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
didgetmaster wrote 1 day ago:
We all learned this back in first grade. The kids that behaved in class
and did their homework did not command most of the teacher's time and
effort. It was the problem children who refused to follow the rules and
needed constant praise for every bit of actual effort that they put
into their studies; that got the teacher's attention.
hattmall wrote 1 day ago:
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, is how I always heard it phrased.
smath wrote 1 day ago:
I'm looking for some data -- if anyone has it -- on the fraction of
companies that are led (CEO) by a technical person, over the
years/decades. I have the (anecdotal) impression that this fraction has
been falling (stories like Boeing), but it would be cool to support or
refute this with hard data. Anyone know where to find/assemble
something like this? Also, if this trend is true, then why?
doctorwho42 wrote 1 day ago:
I don't have the data, but I think a good case study is the company
MITRE.
Originally it was engineers from the top down, but over the last
15-20 years those leaders with engineering backgrounds have retired
and been replaced by non-engineer MBA's. And the more I look around,
the more I see that as a common trope is the US.
fsagx wrote 1 day ago:
If this has been true, perhaps at some point the pendulum will swing
back the other way. BTW the current CEO of Boeing is a mechanical
engineer.
HTML [1]: https://www.boeing.com/company/bios/kelly-ortberg
falsemyrmidon wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
After decades of infamous quality drops that have impacted their
reputation and finally bottom line under non technical CEOs.
tjmc wrote 1 day ago:
This is why I'll never be a fire protection engineer
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Related. Others?
Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001)
[pdf] - [1] - Feb 2024 (424 comments)
Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems That Never Happened (2001)
[pdf] - [2] - Jan 2015 (50 comments)
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820
ChicknNuggt wrote 1 day ago:
This is exactly the problem with the nature prevention. When it's well
done, it seems like nothing was done.
HerbManic wrote 1 day ago:
When Covid started, our local government was very clear from the
start in saying "If people think we have over reacted, then that
means we have done a good job."
Alas, that doesn't always fly with the populace.
teiferer wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
Trouble is that it is not always true either. You can legitimately
overreact and in hindsight it can be hard to distinguish between
these two things.
Plus, even if you did overreact, that can still be the better side
to have erred on, in moderation.
sublinear wrote 1 day ago:
Making critical decisions without oversight is just as bad, or maybe
worse.
If you frame it this way in a meeting, you will get the attention you
want. Don't say I didn't warn you because that comes with a lot of
scrutiny you might not want.
nxy wrote 1 day ago:
Very true! Along with it comes with peace/quietness at work so itâs
not too bad.
Guestmodinfo wrote 1 day ago:
Human civilization runs on personal sacrifices but money bags will
never care about that.
N_Lens wrote 1 day ago:
Good thing weâre converting human civilization into money bags at
maximum speed, then. Solves all problems elegantly.
erelong wrote 1 day ago:
So let's create moments or days of observance to make people aware of
preventative measures taken
alok-g wrote 1 day ago:
I align as such.
Then we soon see non-technical people start leading the same, pushing
for some people to be recognized for this every sprint. Meaningless
recognition starts coming in. The process fades out in just a couple
weeks.
The problem is there are these people in the mix, often leading, who
do not understand.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
A moment of silence to appreciate the silence the proactive measures
gave us.
keyle wrote 1 day ago:
I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up
getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter
because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how
important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves.
Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the
lights on.
It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between
non-technical management (who understands how to double click) and
engineering (who holds the company standing).
I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from
engineering.
eldenbishop wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the
entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and
restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything.
Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their
budgets frozen and lost headcount.
smrtinsert wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
Which they should. I've been lucky enough to work at places that had
great non-technical managers that promoted based on great execution,
as well as highly technical managers that also promoted based on
great execution.
Now I'm at the other kind of place and it sucks. They'll fire the
performative engineers though during layoff season. It's almost like
they like playing politics until it really matters.
swiftcoder wrote 16 hours 49 min ago:
> I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended
up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter
because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how
important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves.
This is a very game-able system, and I'd wager a decent amount that
any senior engineers on those teams know exactly what they are doing.
In a lot of (broken, but aren't they all) management structures, it's
better to be seen to swoop in with the save than to quietly fix it
ahead of time.
And if your management is structuring rewards like this, it leads to
your seniors anticipating a bunch of these failures, lining up 90% of
the fix before hand, so that they can jump on the oncall escalation
with a 100% "Hail Mary" of a fix...
akudha wrote 17 hours 17 min ago:
Isnât this a universal problem though, not just software industry?
Even at home, if one kid just does his thing quietly but another kid
is difficult, what do we say? âJohn has his problems but he is
trying, we gotta encourage himâ. While his brother gets no praise
or attention for just doing his thing quietly without fuss.
When things run smoothly, very few people notice. When things break,
everyone notices
mmsimanga wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
As a middle child this rings true for me.
order-matters wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
itemize the problems you are preventing
"Accounted for X situation"
"Added gaurdrails to protect against Y"
When working as a business analyst i have to do this sort of thing
all hte time or else id get no credit for half my work
oliver236 wrote 18 hours 55 min ago:
could an AI product solve this?
RA_Fisher wrote 19 hours 27 min ago:
Econometricians can solve it, bc we can create rigorous models that
map causal inputs to output.
Itâs extremely advanced technology, though, and most CEOs would
rather rent seek / camp than give up some decision-making power (and
very few are even aware itâs possible).
brianjlogan wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
Do you have any good sources for this I'd be interested in learning
more
RA_Fisher wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
I used AI to unpack it a bit here: [1] I'd generally point to
econometrics and statistics applied to business. The key activity
is causal inference and then the context determines the mix of
econo vs. stats required to help the org make high-quality
decisions to increase output or make it more lucrative or
higher-quality.
HTML [1]: https://statwonk.com/econometricians-can-build-decision-...
netfortius wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
In my 35+ years in IT, the "hero attitude" was the one in the top
three I most hated traits in a person working with or for me. And
talking about traits, I considered crucial to always have in my teams
a "saboteur" engineer - the one who thoght, found, come up with all
the way we could break a design, service, infra components, app,
etc., when all the others were designing or operating for perfect or
normal conditions.
pimlottc wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
Genuine heroism - a willingness to step up when needed - isn't a
bad thing in itself. But /needing/ a hero just to function means
the system is fundamentally broken. Maybe it's a bad process, maybe
it's understaffing, maybe it's neglected maintenance, maybe it's a
lack of contingency planning. But there's no reason everyone can't
go home at 5 PM every night and still get things done.
abby3010 wrote 18 hours 35 min ago:
Love the "saboteur" approach. I honestly want to be one my own
career in IT, but as you have rightfully conveyed, "hero attitude"
is what gets you visibility!
palata wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
> I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come
from engineering.
I disagree with the implied idea here that "engineers are better
managers". The solution is to have good management, not to assume
that "engineers are better managers". I have seen good and bad
managers, and in both groups there were engineers and non-engineers.
t43562 wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
Engineers may not be better managers but it's not easy to really
manage something you don't have any insight in.
mrweasel wrote 20 hours 53 min ago:
At a previous job the CEO/owner had the idea that you'd get some
percentage of any cost saving your could find as a bonus. Something
like 20% of the savings for the first year.
My colleague in the IT department had one idea, replace our
commercial certificates with Let's Encrypt and drop the EV
requirement. In total he'd stand to get a bonus of a little over
â¬2000. He never got the money, because things like that was part of
his job apparently.
eru wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
Wow, that's pretty silly. 2000 Euros is almost nothing in the
grand scheme of things, and it would have showed that the policy
was sincere.
wccrawford wrote 16 hours 54 min ago:
Even dumber, they've now got a disgruntled employee, and everyone
around them knows they were cheated by the company.
If the policy is wrong and needs to be more specific, pay it out
this time and change the policy. Don't just break your word.
The policy they think they've implemented is stupid. "Save money
in someone else's department" is just going to create a ton of
anger as people rush to step on each other's toes, and then those
people have to constantly re-justify all the decisions they've
made.
It's absolutely brain-dead.
otikik wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
> a disgruntled employee
With access to the SSL certificates.
wizzwizz4 wrote 15 hours 32 min ago:
Freefall has a discussion of that (mini-arc starting here: [1]
).
HTML [1]: https://freefallmirror.com/ff4300/fv04289.htm
ForgotIdAgain wrote 21 hours 15 min ago:
I guess the point of view is that if a department is well running, it
means it is overressourced. So you reduce the ressources until it's
breaking point, just enough for it to not fail. A jaded service
manager told me it was part of its official training: if the clients
was too satisfied that meant that human ressources were wasted on
them, so he had to spin plates between clients. I guess it was
economically optimal.
eloisant wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
This is a short-term view approach and can really hurt a company on
the long term.
It's also why US car companies are a wreck.
dfhgdfghdfgdf wrote 21 hours 55 min ago:
I believe it's a problem in most industries and even humanity in
general. I don't believe it's a business problem at all.
Heroes are lauded even if they solve problems they themselves are the
cause of - which is conveniently either forgotten or denied - or they
are solving non-issues that are deemed important by the
ignorami-class. Politics, for example, is utterly dominated by this
dynamic.
It's the first instinct: let the expert run the show. However, one of
the (many) ways to let a complex project fall apart completely is to
hand over full control to engineers. I'm one myself, but I know what
I'm good at and what not. Dunning-Kruger is often mentioned in these
discussions, but don't forget it also applies to engineers that often
lack any management or leadership experience of any appreciable kind.
They vastly overestimate their ability to handle management and
organization-wide issues and tend to not only miss the forest for the
trees but actually miss the trees for the leaves.
"Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan actually mentions
how proper management was crucial to their success. It's a detail
that's frequently conveniently forgotten by the engineers who think
themselves better than the "suits". For the record, I don't claim
engineers are the primary problem, but it's not just management's
either. Quotes like "who holds the company standing" and "who
understands how to double click" are enormous smells and IMO make
quite clear what's happening here.
I don't have ready-made solutions unfortunately, but I do wish we
would look further than "it's the suits". It's a systemic, human
problem that I believe is a natural result of operating under
informational constraints and, very human, cognitive biases on all
sides.
fabianholzer wrote 21 hours 28 min ago:
Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan
lists stability of the environment with regard to funding,
structure, mission as well as technical competence of the
management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the
reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly
basis and where the executives are MBA types.
sdfsd233fsdf wrote 16 hours 20 min ago:
If one of the most successful engineering organizations in
history attributes part of its success to capable management,
that undermines simplistic narratives where management is
inherently the problem and engineers would naturally thrive if
left alone.
If anything, the Bell Labs example supports the idea that
exceptional outcomes require both strong technical talent and
strong management working together.
Not saying the "MBAs" are helping the situation, but the hero
developers and their resume driven development practices aren't
exactly angels either.
fabianholzer wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in
math, science and engineering fields.
I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would
naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form
of management automatically add value.
I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems
maccard wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
> It's a serious problem in this industry
Itâs not a problem in this industry, itâs a problem everywhere.
> I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come
from engineering.
You mean the engineers who are causing the chaos youâre complaining
about?
Engineers arenât some magic group of people who know better than
others - weâre just as fallible as other people.
atoav wrote 23 hours 57 min ago:
I run the media tech at an university solo. Needless to say I am
underfunded. But more importantly, the infrastructure was underfunded
too. I made it my first policy to also report near misses up the
chain with their full implications, e.g. a list of events that we
would not have been able to make.
E.g. that time a central media controls power supply broke down which
would have made using one of the most prestigious rooms impossible. I
fixed it myself by swapping in a spare power supply from a used unit,
then went on to remind them twice a year that we are now living on
borrowed time and I take no responsibilities if a fault I predict to
happen and get no funds to fix will in fact happen. 4 years later I
got the funds.
Having stuff costs money. Everybody wants to invest funds once, but
nobody wants to keep paying for maintenance.
renegade-otter wrote 1 day ago:
Ah, yes - the person who comes in at 7AM and gets shit done by 11 is
a slacker, and the one in the office just doing nothing after 6PM is
the hard worker. Same thing.
You can't fix this. Out of sight, out of mind. It is hard-wired into
us. It's all about the optics, and will always be.
moezd wrote 1 day ago:
Managers will let you get away with anything if you time your reports
correctly. They also don't want to sit in meetings where they are
reminded of better outsourcing alternatives and they chose to dogfeed
instead.
We've become too comfortable, since actual toil is no longer seen in
the company: Manufacturing is overseas, customer support is overseas,
logistics is an afterthought with established guarantees. Thus we
want the mild weather and smooth meetings. If your engineering team
is too smooth, maybe you should already branch out to help other
related but "struggling" teams to get your hands dirty and noticed.
pbreit wrote 1 day ago:
Since it's entirely possible (extremely likely?) the "problem" would
never materialize, this is quite reasonable.
__patchbit__ wrote 1 day ago:
SpaceX almost has a full grip on the planetary consciousness
extinction problem.
warumdarum wrote 1 day ago:
Car industry best practices
gamerDude wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are
hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as
amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you
treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy.
This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as
a society since this is pervasive.
bonsai_spool wrote 1 day ago:
> something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare
Respectfully, the solution is don't smoke, exercise, eat well,
sleep, avoid stressors... These aren't easy problems but their
solution isn't at the individual patient level and is a simple
question of capital and political will.
The 'hope' envisages a product to temporize the solution while
extracting large payments.
necovek wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
Nope, I believe you are wrong: a path where we, for example,
forbid smoking because the statistics point at it correlating
with many health problems, is a world where we use the same
statistical tool to prescribe human behavior to the last detail.
It is not just about smoking, alcohol, late night dancing,
switching sex partners, fast driving on a track, paragliding,
skydiving, climbing, car driving, bicycle driving, motor biking,
even staying late for astronomical observations (sleep
patterns?)... all carry insignificant risk when looked at
statistically.
> ...avoid stressors...
Most stress is caused by a conflict between our
expectations/motivations and the reality (everyone else's).
bonsai_spool wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
> forbid smoking because the statistics point at it
correlating with many health problems, is a world where we use
the same statistical tool to prescribe human behavior to the
last detail.
I had a really great egg for breakfast. This now means I will
never eat anything else besides eggs.
Also, I realized that cars run better with oil changes every 3
months or 5,000 miles. Because shorter was better, we should
all start changing oil daily.
The best player in the basketball game last week was over 7'4"
tall. I guess I need to discourage anyone who isn't that tall
from playing ever.
Do you see why banning smoking is a good idea?
necovek wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
You seem to have inverted the logic: I did not say we have to
make everybody smoke, which your examples imply.
My position is: do not ban (make illegal!) everything that
has statistically significant risk for one's health (like
smoking, alcohol, mountain climbing, spelunking, bike-riding,
horse-riding, car racing, NFL...).
So no, I do not see why banning smoking altogether is a good
idea (and no, I am not a smoker â I never was either). I
can get behind increased health premiums or heavy taxation,
banning smoking in communal spaces...
dchevell wrote 1 day ago:
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury
directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never
change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your
priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an
organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from
bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for
org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before
just repairing it.
Building the right incentives around that can be tricky, those
incentives need to ensure the highest levels of management aren't
themselves disincentivising their directs & their departments from
surfacing pain & problems - but it's also pretty common for people to
mask those signals purely out of a well-intentioned desire to help.
It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes,
it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not
be so reactive to them.
Too many companies ground their performance incentives & processes
around oversimplified ideas that don't match the reality of human
behaviour
nilamo wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
"You knew there was a problem, and didn't fix it? You're here
because I don't know programming. Fired."
I think we've worked with very different kinds of people...
friendzis wrote 22 hours 23 min ago:
> If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain
signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led
to that harm or reconsider your priorities.
At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching
hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot,
but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they
learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even
by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a
person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.
> Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization
isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it
needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership,
which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing
it.
Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more
clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity"
should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very
rare while.
> It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group
sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play
out and not be so reactive to them.
You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems"
are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very
little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit
tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly
unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason
why we have management class in the first place.
The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold
fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything
in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed
cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by
higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and
costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively
incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal
firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get
rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to
tell the two apart.
nemomarx wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
Unlike a teenage child, management has the unfortunate effect of
being made up of people who can leave the company, forget past
experience, etc. So you do kind of have to treat them like a
child who needs continuous feedback and signals.
For a more broad example than IT cost center stuff, you can look
at how some large companies go through cycles of arrogance with
their customer bases, launch a product that fails, and then are
humbled enough to try and pivot and earn good will back.
Microsoft is always somewhere in this cycle for instance. The
organization can never really learn this lesson permanently and
will "regress" from time to time based on financial pressure or
greed or some other impulse.
Forgeties79 wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
Honestly? Iâm just super direct with the exec team now after
trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every
company, Iâm just lucky to be at a place where the company
culture allows for this.
Iâll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our
systems. They ask âis it a need?â and Iâll say something like
âwe can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance
in the next 6mo of having a major failure and embarrassing
ourselves in front of a live audience in the thousands as well as
our client.â They then decide how much that risk is worth to
them, and whatever they decide is kind of out of my hands at that
point. If the thing I warned them of comes because they didnât
pay for it, I can point to the receipts (though Iâve never had
to, weâre small enough people remember those conversations).
60% of the time they just get what I need maybe? But ultimately
itâs about CYA. Tell them whatâs up, tell them what the
solution is, tell them what the consequences are if they donât do
the solution, and make them decide.
Again this obviously depends on company culture and structure, but
I canât imagine on the only person who can do this!
z3t4 wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
An example that not all companies are run by idiots. The job
market is not a healthy market though, where its more important
to know ppl then to be great at some skill. But if leadership
sucks just leave if you can, that will fix the problem.
Forgeties79 wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
Totally. I am pretty lucky to be where Iâm at.
HlessClaudesman wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
The Dunning Kruger effect suggests that the people who caused the
pain are also those least likely to feel it.
eru wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
Dunning Kruger's paper didn't even show the Dunning Kruger effect
everyone loves.
bmacho wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
In the original DK experiment they asked students after they
had taken a test that where would their score end up compared
to their classmates (which they had no knowledge of). Obviously
they picked scores around the middle*
Which resulted in top students 'undervaluating themselves' and
bottom students 'overestimating themselves'. Or
under/overvaluating a random future variable that they don't
have knowledge of, at least.
The original DK paper actually shows a positive correlation
between the guesses and the test results: students are
generally aware how they are among their peers, and smarter
students guessed higher than studetns with less time to study
on their hand.
This being said, the 'DK effect' is something people talk
about, and it might exist, and it might be perceived by people.
It's just that the original DK paper does not support it.
* another lesser talked problem with the DK paper is that
people don't actually believe the answers they give, because
the question is nonsensical.
If someone just takes a test, they won't think that "I'm sure
I'll end up the 24% this time". Even if they are forced to
anwser this question, even then they won't believe it, because
that's not how random and future work. People are generally
aware of about where they will perform (with positive
correlation, in fact the original DK paper shows it) but they
are not aware of results of specific, random future events, and
they are not claiming that they know the results of specific,
random future events, or believe it in their hearts.
DK paper tries to frame them as they were actually believing
this, but they are not.
More to read at:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
HlessClaudesman wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
Can't we just get to the pop culture version of the DK effect
by deduction?
It seems reasonable to assume that for some group of
intellects they are not smart enough to know how not smart
they are. There is no definite boundary where this effect is
either on or off, therefore there are probably some
gradations to this awareness as you climb up the intelligence
ladder.
Another way of putting it: if dumb people had more insight
they would cease to be dumb.
chii wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
That's why you change it to make the pain work. This does need
CEO-level cooperation to implement, but i think it is possible.
AndrewKemendo wrote 13 hours 51 min ago:
CEOâs are generally the ones causing the pain
locknitpicker wrote 23 hours 53 min ago:
> By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury
directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never
change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your
priorities.
I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and
action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to
higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the
problem is fixed or mitigated.
If the problem doesn't exist to begin with, there is no signal.
Managers don't get to show their fast-acting skills, and there are
no heroics to speak of.
So ultimately poorly maintained and managed projects who deliver
fixes for problems of their own doing create a perverse incentive,
whereas no one is lauded or promoted for doing normal day-to-day
things.
atoav wrote 23 hours 9 min ago:
Well I think it is even more complex. If you're a plumber in a
rotten system of pipes the whole company depends on, you can fix
issues day in and day out, without speaking a word and they will
notice everything is a bit unreliable and thus you do a bad job.
You could do the exact same work, but make a big thing about
every major fix, warn people a week ahead, give them the feeling
the company depends on it and then do the exact same work and
tell them how you fixed it. Suddenly you did a good job, despite
you literally doing the exact same thing with your hands.
The difference is how it was communicated. Most
non-Tech/non-infrastructure-people got no clue about these
things. If they know you're battling the demons of plumbing on
their behalf they will thank you, if you're the weird guy that
has smeared dirt in the face and is seen once a week while the
plumbing fails ever so often, guess what.
That means even if the problems and their fixes remain the same,
the communication around them really matters. Tech people can be
extremely bad with this. And if we're talking IT it is really the
plumbing that holds the company together.
thelastgallon wrote 1 day ago:
+10,000%
Often, 'leaders' make mistakes and people below suffer the
consequences. It is important to let these leaders deal with the
pain caused by their decisions from their cluelessness about how
things work.
antonvs wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from
outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have
incompetent organizations.
atoav wrote 23 hours 51 min ago:
No it does not need to come from the outside. If you're an
underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a
week, you will get that funding. If you're heroically obscuring
the fact that things are falling apart you won't. That means even
if you could somehow, heroically fix it, it isn't perceived as
such if nobody ever felt the problem and saw you fix it.
This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in
every meeting is not.
thx67 wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
The problem is that management witnesses the pain, but the
response isn't to adjust behavior, it is then to punish the
limb where the pain originated from. The reason that people
pull heroics is also because the organization isn't healthy,
and cannot reflect on its actions. Papering over organizational
flaws is a symptom of a larger, often unseen problem. If it was
healthy, someone would have already said, "hey, I think we need
to work on this networking component" and it would have been
looked at.
Pain propagation, to use the corpus metaphor isn't enough.
bluGill wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
The problem is sometimes management knows who the heroes are
and so by not fixing things they know you are not competent.
Thus letting things bubble up isn't always a good plan. It is
really hard when you are on the bottom to know which case
things are.
friendzis wrote 22 hours 57 min ago:
> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in
every meeting is not.
More often than not it is some IT dude observing network
crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward
trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and
there will be issues twice a week in some time.
> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has
an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.
More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected
they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until
the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then
some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue
underfunded IT department "could not".
jt2190 wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
How did you make the illogical leap to âcould notâ?
Repeatedly requesting time/budget to fix an ongoing issue is
a requirement of any half-decent manager. If theyâre
reporting issues then just smiling blankly when asked âwhat
can we do about it?â theyâve failed their basic job duty.
order-matters wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
IT doesnt control the funding so at that point its not an
issue of awareness but a management decision to live with
this problem and focus funding elsewhere
more often than not, many things in the business are on fire
and underfunded at the same time. you can get recognition
for your work without the problem being permanently solved
the right way, and it may not result in more funding but
peopel will think of you for new opportunities that pop up
later as someone who is reliable.
if you dont think the recognition will happen and youre just
burning out solving these problems then stop solving them.
new problem pops up thats outside your job description, its
not your problem. generally though if youre working for
someone like that anything you do is a lose-lose
balex wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
It comes back to communication. If management acknowledges
the issue but redirects budget elsewhere due to priorities,
it's legit. Communicating it in a way IT personnel
understand and accept isn't necessarily easy. Sometimes
there's also incentive for management to avoid it
altogether (we need to focus elsewhere and this could burn
you out, but you're an acceptable loss).
That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a
language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever.
Preferably quantified without drowning them in numbers or
fear mongering. That's what pain is all about.
kamaal wrote 1 day ago:
>>I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come
from engineering.
Given the whole point of management is to work to ensure their own
survival and growth, it would in their interest to kill genuine
competition when its coming up.
Who wants to raise their new competition and lose to them, no one!
esafak wrote 1 day ago:
Track leading indicators, pricing them if possible.
HerbManic wrote 1 day ago:
This thinking eventually results in The Scream Test. When the screams
come as a system fails that is when they act on it.
Alas, for many parts of society there is a large amount of people
that would rather be reactive than proactive. It means it is easier
today but harder long term.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
I think a good place to start is tracking all the proactive things
being done and reporting them. At least then maybe someone will see
why itâs quiet, because youâve anticipated the problems and
stopped them before they start.
When things come up with other teams, youâll have a catalog of
tasks that were done to show why you didnât have the same issue.
The work was done, just at a better time to avoid downtime.
qurren wrote 1 day ago:
> start is tracking all the proactive things being done and
reporting them
Speaking from experience, this does nothing. If you're at a company
that is okay with average performers, then absolutely, 100%, fix
all the bugs in advance, make the system rock solid and stable,
prevent downtime, be a good engineer.
If on the other hand if you're at a company where 10% of people
must get stack ranked and PIP, or at a company where "meets
expectations" actually means you're going to get the stick, and
you're supposed to be "redefining" expectations every year ... then
yeah, don't do anything preventative. The optics are better when
you take the 3am on-call and fix the issue (that you secretly knew
in the first place would happen some time in the future in your
coworker's code, and already knew how to fix -- but don't actually
fix it until it surfaces). Be the savior that the VPs praise in the
next meeting, that's your insurance against the PIP.
They set the rules of the game, you just play the game. The rules
were their choice. They could have chosen different rules.
Sharlin wrote 19 hours 35 min ago:
> They set the rules of the game, you just play the game.
Obviously the only winning move here is not to play. Things like
stack ranking are a perversion and no amount of compensation
would be worth working for a company like that. If you choose to
play, you're complicit in the moral abomination.
qurren wrote 9 hours 18 min ago:
It's not always a choice when the system increases costs of
living to a point where you need to enter a toxic company in
order to literally exist, and interview acceptance rates are
abysmally low.
If I had enough money that employment is optional, then yeah, I
can make that choice, but until then, I'm not complicit.
nrightnour wrote 1 day ago:
I'm sorry about your experience.
Personally, I only rehire people from projects that went
smoothly, not ones where I had to make the urgent phone call.
Teams that "just work" are highly valued. They clear up my
attention for other things.
mrgoldenbrown wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
Did you manage/hire in a stack rank environment?
fgonzag wrote 1 day ago:
Teams that just work can't exist in stack ranked companies. You
can't keep the team as a whole, you always have to cut someone.
Which means that everyone is playing the game to not be cut.
bruce511 wrote 1 day ago:
True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if
you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is
the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway.
The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job
hunting.
But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a
place. In that case the game is different.
In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important,
it's necessary to promote the visibility of your (just
working) team. If visibility is the game, then be visible.
You know how test-driven-dev was always "write the test
first"? In that environment a test is always written before
any code.
Well in the "ticket closing" scenario it's important to open
a ticket, regardless of how trivial, for every code action
taken. For every meeting attended. For every scenario dodged.
If tickets are the way to score then write tickets.
If "being a hero" is the valuable thing, then be a hero. Be
prepared to champion your team every chance you get. Every
time you interact with management stress the emergency you
just fixed (before it became an emergency.) Tomorrow do it
again with the next thing.
Management needs visibility. Be visible. I know, this seems
stupid and beneath you. But that's why they call it a job,
not playtime.
qurren wrote 15 hours 31 min ago:
> I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a
place
I worked at Amazon, previously.
> Management needs visibility.
I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of
jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally
visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing
the state of things rather than waiting for people to
deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility"
in spades are often charlatans. People who deliver fixes,
code, and improvements in spades usually do not have time
to manage their own public relations for your visibility.
However, you have ALL the tools to proactively see what
they've been upto. You can attend their standups and other
regular meetings, you can set up an updates document, you
can see what they've been posting in Slack, you can look at
their PRs and commits, you can look at JIRA tickets, and in
the age of AI you can have AI explain to you all of the
parts of the above that you do not understand.
bruce511 wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
I don't disagree. However few managers are this
proactive. If you have such a manager, then fantastic.
If not then making yourself more visible becomes
necessary. Because you can be sure (at least some of)
your co-workers are doing so.
Or, you know, stand on principle, then come here to
complain about injustice as things work out badly. :)
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
I refuse to play those games. If they want to fire me for
avoiding problems instead of sacrificing my sleep, fine. Iâll
go stock shelves at Walmart.
If someone is constantly playing the hero, I see that as
incompetence. If the boss canât see that, they are also
incompetent. I have no respect for âleadersâ who donât know
how to get out of the firefight.
Iâve made some high profile appearances, working 18 hour days
on 4 day long outages, from vendor issues I was no part in
causing. I figure that gives me some good will on playing hero
without willingly creating problems for myself. Iâm too old to
manufacture stress for the optics.
For what itâs worth, with the right boss, I have had proper
reporting work. Everything ran smooth and work was relaxed. My
boss would regularly tell me I should take 3 months off because
we were so far ahead of everyone. He would occasionally get bored
and lob a grenade into the works to cause some chaos, but since
everything else was running so smooth we were able to sort them
out and keep going. People who couldnât explain what they were
doing were always getting yelled at and assumed to be doing
nothing.
qurren wrote 1 day ago:
> Iâll go stock shelves at Walmart
Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been able to pay for my
healthcare. A certain toxic company's health insurance paid for
my care, though. Prior to joining said toxic company I'd be
racking up $6000+ in healthcare bills a year with shitty
startup-sponsored insurance.
After 2 years, it was decided I didn't play the hero well
enough though, and ended up having to leave. I work for a less
toxic company now, but the next time I need a heart-related
surgery (likely in ~5-10 years) I'll join a toxic company in
the months leading up to pay for it.
The rules of the US, I guess.
> Iâm too old to manufacture stress
My point was less about manufacturing artificial stress. I
don't do that. But many times I see issues in coworkers' code.
If the company will value and praise me for catching and fixing
them early, then by all means I'll do that. But if fixing
issues in the codebase early for prevention only gets me
criticism of "you haven't met expectations, we expect you to
exceed expectations every performance cycle" then hell, I don't
feel like fixing anything proactively. In that world I'd rather
be the hero that fixes it when it surfaces, that's more likely
to nail the rating.
al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
Health insurance does complicate things. I hope your heart is
doing well now.
I will say my motivation for helping other people avoid
issues has dropped. If they want to make problems for
themselves, they can. Me helping them hasnât worked so far,
so maybe some sleepless nights will be a better teacher.
I had a former boss call me Brent after reading the Phoenix
Project. That made me step back and stop helping so much.
Everything seems worse, but whatever⦠if thatâs what they
want.
willXare wrote 1 day ago:
The tragedy is that ânothing brokeâ looks like ânothing was
doneâ to people far enough away from the system.
_carbyau_ wrote 1 day ago:
Things keep breaking - "What are we paying you for?"
Nothing ever breaks. - "What are we paying you for?"
Management can choose their burden.
ChicknNuggt wrote 1 day ago:
I feel that disconnect is everywhere, when the suits dont see
anything and act on reports
markvdb wrote 1 day ago:
> It's a serious problem in this industry
s/in this industry//
kshacker wrote 1 day ago:
lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does
not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do
some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage
people since you need to build their careers.
I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need
to present to directors not because they need to know, but because
your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you
back out, someone else needs to step up.
Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to
almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every
quarter.
bruce511 wrote 1 day ago:
You define "productivity" as coding.
The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support,
coding, whatever".
Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they
want.
I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure
your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up
doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread).
Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated
me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less
frustrated.
kshacker wrote 1 day ago:
When did I say I code?
I have been on the industry for 35 years. I have seen my share of
technology evolutions and o have seen the work from a dozen
different dimensions. If after all that time, I find the process
painful, just trust me -- they can't change me, and I can't
change them. You take the warts with the wins and move on. 2-3
bad weeks, 10 good weeks. Life moves on to next quarter. Complete
CEO mindset :)
dfhgdfghdfgdf wrote 21 hours 51 min ago:
You heavily implied presentation preparation implies zero
productivity. He tried to say this prep is also productive even
if you personally don't or can't appreciate it.
kshacker wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
Last comment and I will see myself out.
I meant my other productivity drops because I am not a
natural presenter so even though I am rehearsing / editing
for 2 hours a day, the presentation consumes me / overwhelms
me that I can't even focus for the remaining 4 hours or 2
hours. Just do the bare minimum email processing, just
survive. Everyone knows it. But by being in that zone of
paralysis, I can still deliver a presentation. Sometimes good
sometimes ok.
I have this need for the presentation content to reside in my
memory cache and other work disrupts the cache quite badly.
But that's not a way to live. The other work stalled for 3
weeks.
mdmabatj wrote 1 day ago:
There is something I saw on a reddit post of all places, about how
every manager who doesn't predict a baseline of "3 annoying problems
every month, 1 awful problem every 3 months" is essentially a bad
manager. The reasoning being that, if your number of problems is under
that threshold, then someone is doing a 'good job'.
senectus1 wrote 1 day ago:
sounds like my day to day job experience.
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
Two counter-examples:
- Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been
perfect for covid response, but the next governor didnât want to pay
1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it.
- Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump
fired because it was a âbad dealâ. In the absence of that team, we
got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19.
Thereâs also the related category of ânever blamed for fixing
problems poorly, creating even bigger problemsâ.
Thanks to 9/11, plane cockpits can now be locked from the inside. Now,
we have examples of commercial passenger airline pilots locking the
doors and committing mass-murder-suicide by plane crash.
For some reason, these stories donât make the news.
arcanemachiner wrote 1 day ago:
You might want to double check your dates on that SARS claim. Are you
talking about the swine flu outbreak?
timmg wrote 1 day ago:
There are a lot of things like this.
My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect.
So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a
clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah,
of course."
Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up
getting kudos for building something so difficult :D
nomel wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
Yeap. Managers perceive complexity by how personally confused they
are. I'm late in my career, and I'm realizing I wasted so many man
years trying to make code clean, user friendly, and maintainable,
when that code was never read by another person again and forgotten
15 minutes after it was released, then used for years. This is why I
think AI is coming for our jobs much sooner than many people think:
clean code, separation of concerns, maintainability, etc, all the
things we spend the most time on, have never actually been valued.
"Good enough" is fine, and keeps management happy. And, if something
does pop up, AI can patch it, even if with spaghetti, just like
fucking that ass at work.
t43562 wrote 17 hours 14 min ago:
On the other hand, I don't help people with their computer problems
anymore because I've found that the more difficult the problem, the
longer it takes me to rescue their data or whatever the less
impressed they are. The more miraculous the save the more likely they
are to tell me the story about their nephew who solved a trivial
issue instantly as if to point out that I didn't.
mrheosuper wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
"An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity"
chorizo wrote 13 hours 50 min ago:
In academia that translates to, the more senior the faculty member,
the easier the talk is to understand.
dfhgdfghdfgdf wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
One of those days, however, you come up with another of your elegant,
simple solutions and it actually replaces a 150K LoC monstrosity with
either a 1K script or, even better, with nothing as a simple shift in
perspective or process obsoletes it completely.
In the long run, IME, you'll be recognized either by management or
your peers if you keep doing that over and over again.
ocimbote wrote 1 day ago:
There was a thread recently on HN about Claude Shannon and how his
papers were filled with clear descriptions and explanations. Then
someone commented how they had found an elegant solution to a problem
that either could be described shortly and beautifully so that a high
schooler could understand or take the long and tedious path of a
convoluted explanation.
The director then clearly advised that they should use the
complicated way because that's how you get published: not because
you're clever, but because your solutions sound complicated.
It resonates perfectly with your comment and it's an unfortunate
reality that most people don't bother for beautiful solutions and
praise complicated processes. That's how we neded up with
bureaucracy, probably :D
roncesvalles wrote 1 day ago:
Every company where I've worked at as a SWE openly rewarded
"engineering complexity" as a criteria for getting promoted, which
I've always found to be absurd because complexity can always be
manufactured (both of the problem and the solution).
godelski wrote 1 day ago:
> elegant solutions
My favorite is how people will yell at you about how elegance doesn't
matter, that they "just care that it works", and "keep it simple".
I'm certain all the sayings repeated in industry are metastasized
variants of actually good practices repeated by those who can't be
bothered to understand what they mean.
And of course that's true. We push for speed, absent of direction,
while praising velocity. To be honest, at this point I'm disappointed
the engineers gave up and just started becoming business people.
HerbManic wrote 1 day ago:
I have said it for decades - Basic is easy, Simple is hard.
But when someone comes up with something simple but effective, it
always looks so obvious in retrospect.
fugaziboutit wrote 1 day ago:
"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le
loisir de la faire plus courte."
("I have made this longer than usual, only because I have not had the
time to make it shorter.")
Blaise Pascal
k3liutZu wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
when there is nothing left to take away."
â Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
hansbo wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
I read this in Leonard Nimoy's voice, from narrating Civilization
IV.
dfhgdfghdfgdf wrote 21 hours 40 min ago:
"A facility for quotation covers the absence of original
thought."
â Dorothy Sayers
kristiandupont wrote 1 day ago:
I am reminded of this course in university where there was a
written assignment with a minimum page count. Even at that time, I
remember thinking: "If I am able to express everything necessary in
just one page, that should give me the absolute top grade!".
nullhole wrote 1 day ago:
The passage that comes to mind for me whenever this idea comes up,
from the Brett version of the Holmes story "The Dancing Men":
H: So, Watson.
W: Hmm.
H: You do not propose to invest in South African securities?
W: How on earth do you know that?
H: Now, confess, you are utterly taken aback.
W: I am!
H: I should make you sign a paper to that effect.
W: Why?
H: Because in a few minutes you will say it is all so absurdly
simple.
W: I should say nothing of the kind!
H: You see, my dear Watson, it is not really difficult to construct
a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each
simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out the
central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting
point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though
possibly a meretricious, effect.
H: I can tell by an inspection of the groove between your left
forefinger and thumb, that you have decided not to invest your small
capital in the gold fields.
W: I can see no connection.
H: Very likely not; but I can quickly give you a close connection.
H: Here are the missing links in the very simple chain: You had
chalk between your forefinger and thumb when you returned from the
club last night. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to ease
the cue. You never play billiards except with Thurston. Now,
Thurston, you told me, four weeks ago, had an option on some South
African security which expired in a month, and which he desired you
to share with him. Your checkbook is locked in my drawer, and you
have not asked for the key. So, you do not propose to invest your
money in that manner.
W: How absurdly simple!
H: Quite so. Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained
to you.
teddyh wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
Why on earth would you quote a TV version of a book, when the book
is readily available to be cited?
â
âSo, Watson,â said he, suddenly, âyou do not propose to
invest in South African securities?â
I gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes's
curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate
thoughts was utterly inexplicable.
âHow on earth do you know that?â I asked.
He wheeled round upon his stool, with a steaming test-tube in his
hand and a gleam of amusement in his deep-set eyes.
âNow, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,â said he.
âI am.â
âI ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.â
âWhy?â
âBecause in five minutes you will say that it is all so absurdly
simple.â
âI am sure that I shall say nothing of the kind.â
âYou see, my dear Watsonââhe propped his test-tube in the
rack and began to lecture with the air of a professor addressing
his classââit is not really difficult to construct a series of
inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in
itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central
inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and
the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a
meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an
inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to
feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in
the goldfields.â
âI see no connection.â
âVery likely not; but I can quickly show you a close connection.
Here are the missing links of the very simple chain: 1. You had
chalk between your left finger and thumb when you returned from the
club last night. 2. You put chalk there when you play billiards to
steady the cue. 3. You never play billiards except with Thurston.
4. You told me four weeks ago that Thurston had an option on some
South African property which would expire in a month, and which he
desired you to share with him. 5. Your cheque-book is locked in my
drawer, and you have not asked for the key. 6. You do not propose
to invest your money in this manner.â
âHow absurdly simple!â I cried.
âQuite so!â said he, a little nettled. âEvery problem becomes
very childish when once it is explained to you. [â¦]â
â The Adventure of the Dancing Men, The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27,
January 1904, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
< [1] >
HTML [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/108/pg108-images.html...
nullhole wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Why on earth? Because I love that TV series, and the passage from
that TV series is what comes to mind for me.
barrenko wrote 1 day ago:
Liking it, but I think it's even better captured by the more lauded
quote -
H: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth?"
Terr_ wrote 1 day ago:
Found the clip:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx6Dr1iJ4p8&t=3m13s
throw0101c wrote 1 day ago:
Meta: I found this video essay (?) "Jeremy Brett vs Basil
Rathbone â Who Was the Real Sherlock Holmes?" interesting:
*
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaQFJcI_yfI
lstodd wrote 1 day ago:
Real Sherlock was Vasily Livanov of course.
npunt wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater
solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses
and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being
impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this
and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the
receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or
indirectly via others, it seems like complexity is not as impressive
as it once was.
nomel wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
Definitely. Previously, intent and effort were required to increase
complexity. Now intent and effort are required to prevent
complexity*!
But also, what a beautiful problem to have!
johnthescott wrote 1 day ago:
"elegance and speed go hand in hand" - d. mcilroy
random3 wrote 1 day ago:
Like nobody gets credit for avoiding problems or unnecessary
things/complexity altogether. In fact the opposite may happen.
rmunn wrote 1 day ago:
Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management
Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I
read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was
actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because
otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very
much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point
would airplanes have been falling out of the sky â I literally heard
someone say that would happen once â even if no effort had been put
into fixing the bug).
But in recent years I have seen people (elsewhere, not on HN) claim
that Y2K was a big nothingburger, and all the money spent on fixing the
bug was wasted. No, that's not true either. All the money spent on
fixing the bug was why it turned into a big nothingburger. Sure, some
of that money was wasted, by executives who wanted an "official"
Y2K-certified certificate, issued by a consulting firm that had nothing
"official" about it except their own say-so. And so they spent $2
million learning what their own employees could have told them for
$2,000. THAT money was wasted. But a lot of banks were running old
COBOL code that used 2-digit years, and needed to be fixed. The fact
that in January 2000, everyone's bank interest was still calculated
correctly, and not calculated as if it was January 1900? THAT was
entirely due to the vast amounts of money spent paying old COBOL coders
to come out of retirement and fix the 2-digit years.
The lesson I learned from that is that it's possible for a problem to
be overhyped, even massively overhyped, and yet still be a serious
problem. The other lesson I should have learned is that people rarely
get credit (I won't go so far as the article authors and say "nobody
ever gets credit") for fixing problems that never happened.
kristiandupont wrote 1 day ago:
>no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky
The assertion may have been unfounded, but I think it's just as
unreasonable to assert the opposite. Bugs have cascading effects and
in a sufficiently complex piece of software they can create chaos
with unpredictable outcomes.
rmunn wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
The one case I'm aware of where a software glitch did cause a plane
crash, there was pilot error compounding the problem. Air France
flight 447 was an Airbus A330 flying from France to Brazil, and
while high over the Atlantic, the software recorded inconsistent
data in its airspeed measurements. (The official crash analysis
team concluded that the inconsistent data was likely due to ice
crystals blocking the pitot tubes on the plane). The inconsistent
data made the autopilot disengage. Pilot error then caused a stall.
One pilot then tried the correct move to recover from a stall,
pushing forward on the stick to nose down and regain speed. The
other pilot was pulling up on the stick to stop the dive, not
realizing that that's exactly the wrong thing to do in a stall (or
more likely forgetting his training due to panic; he had a lot less
experience). The flight software, receiving inconsistent inputs
from both controls, averaged the inputs, resulting in zero change
in pitch. (It also sounded the "Dual Input" alarm, but the pilots
were too preoccupied with their own controls to figure out what
that meant at first, and by the time they figured out what was
going on it was too late to recover before the plane hit the
water). [1] has some discussion of the events, including the fact
that the control design (where each pilot has an independent stick)
was part of the problem. On a design like Boeing uses where both
sets of controls move together, the experienced pilot would have
noticed the less-experienced pilot pulling up on the stick because
his own stick would be moving, and he would have said "No, nose
down." And if they had nosed down to recover speed while still high
enough in the air, they almost certainly could have regained
control of the plane and saved 228 lives (including their own).
So in retrospect, I think my first sentence was wrong. The software
did not glitch, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It was
pilot error that caused the initial stall, and multiple pilot
errors that caused the failure to recover from the stall.
There may be examples of software error that has caused planes to
fall out of the sky, but I don't know of any. The only plane
crashes whose cause I know were due to hardware failure or pilot
error, usually a combination of the two.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224707
teiferer wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
I think your conclusion is upside down. Air safety is based on
the "Swiss cheese" model. Multiple layers of safety nets are in
place to compensate for issues in one layer. In particular,
technical safeguards are there to prevent disasters if the human
in the loop makes a mistake which will eventually happen. Any
weakening of any technical safeguard makes the system less safe.
No matter if the human ultimately made a mistake -- the technical
system failing contributed to the accident just as much.
marcus_holmes wrote 1 day ago:
my first thought too. I've met a few people who assert that Y2K was a
complete waste of money.
I earned my first house deposit helping the team fixing the water and
gas company in Wales, UK. Their entire system was running off a set
of COBOL programs on a mainframe, none of which had been properly
documented over the years, and the whole thing used 2-digit dates. It
would have caused actual deaths if not fixed; everything would have
shut down, and no water and no heating in a British winter is
potentially lethal. And then it would have sent everyone in Wales a
bill for 100 years of water and gas.
They were bribing retired software devs to come out of retirement
with huge stacks of money, because that was cheaper than training new
COBOL devs and getting them familiar with the spaghetti system.
It worked, no-one died, life went on. So obviously it was all fake
rolls eyes
rmunn wrote 1 day ago:
I'm curious why things would have shut down when the system thought
it was 1900. What part of the logic had the effect of "shut the
system down if current date is less than (X date)?" (If you can
remember the code 25+ years later, that is).
marcus_holmes wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
I only worked with the team making changes to the billing system
(and even then, I only maintained a database of code modules, who
worked on them, and what changes had been made - this was before
git and we did version control painfully). As you can imagine,
the billing system was definitely not going to survive the date
suddenly being 99 years older than it was last month. So I don't
really know why the rest of the system would fail.
But the project management team were extremely careful about only
changing parts of the system that needed to be changed. Partly so
that the scope was contained and second-order effects limited,
and partly because the people making the changes were being paid
vast sums to do this, and any reduction in work was saving real
money. So when they say that it would all have stopped if the
work wasn't done, I believe them ;)
tjwebbnorfolk wrote 1 day ago:
Y2K is especially interesting because the fact that the year 2000
would one day occur was entirely foreseeable, and no less probable in
1990 than in 1999. I can hardly think of anything with closer to 100%
probability of happening.
Dwedit wrote 1 day ago:
Year 2038 says hi.
alduino wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair, there was a non-zero chance that society could have
ended (or your company, or the tech became obsolete) before 2000,
which would be higher the earlier before 2000 you were.
rmunn wrote 1 day ago:
The tech being obsolete is why Y2K was a smaller problem than it
would have been otherwise. Most places were no longer running
much COBOL code. But banks are famously slow to upgrade their
tech, and for good reason much of the time, so most of the
world's remaining COBOL code (and other code too, COBOL is just
what I'm most familiar with, not that I'm all that familiar with
it) was in banks and other financial institutions.
takinola wrote 1 day ago:
My issue with this version of explaining the lack of severity of Y2K
is that there were lots of countries that were being derided for not
taking the issue seriously but did not seem to suffer any ill
effects.
akoboldfrying wrote 1 day ago:
This is interesting, do you have any links?
A couple of possible confounding factors I can think of:
1. Plenty of countries use software developed elsewhere.
2. I suspect that the more recently you computerised your economy,
the less likely it would be to have code vulnerable to Y2K.
rmunn wrote 1 day ago:
It's also possible that in some places there were a few issues,
but people looked at bills for 100 years of electrical service
and said "Yeah right," and fixed the now-easier-to-find code that
still used 2-digit dates. If that only happened a few times, the
extra work involved in working out the January bill by hand (or
waiting until February then billing for 2 months) wouldn't cause
too many issues in the economy, and anyone looking in from
outside wouldn't even realize there had been an issue. If it
happened everywhere the economic impact would be more noticeable
from outside.
armada651 wrote 1 day ago:
The problem is that a lot of people have a very binary view on life.
Either something is a complete success or a complete waste of money,
rarely do we accept that most projects fall somewhere in the middle.
yvdriess wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
The binary view is mostly true, unless it's for events or problems
they are themselves familiar with. There is a term for this, but
can't for the life of me remember it: People think the problems
they are dealing with are infinitely more nuanced, complex and
unique than the problems other people are dealing with.
cortesoft wrote 1 day ago:
And even worse, they don't think probability is a thing. If
something happens, it was certain to happen and we just failed to
predict it correctly.
So when someone predicts something will happen with a 90%
probability, and then the 10% chances happens and the predicted
event does not happen, people will talk about what a bad prediction
that was and how they were clearly wrong.
It's the same logic that causes people to say vaccines don't work
because they don't stop a disease with 100% effectiveness, or that
there is no point to wear a seatbelt because people still die while
wearing one.
jacques_chester wrote 1 day ago:
You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.
Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after
this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.
Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became
a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school,
where system dynamics first became ignored.
macrocosmos wrote 1 day ago:
One thing I don't get about the concept of capability traps is why is
it expected that a company which is good at one thing would be
capable at the new thing? What exactly makes a capability trap a
trap?
left-struck wrote 22 hours 41 min ago:
I think because itâs a negative feedback cycle. So once it starts
itâs hard to go back, the deeper you are the harder. A trap is
something thatâs easy to get into and hard to get out of.
jacques_chester wrote 1 day ago:
The trap is that you can't get better without first getting worse.
You can't get out of the destructive cycle of production pressure
and decaying productivity without removing the pressure. Many
managers expect, or at least behave as if they expect, improvement
to be monotonic and costless.
thx67 wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
When you are at capacity and in a degraded state, you have no
additional headroom to get out of that state. Why wounds won't
heal, or the poor stay poor.
Jtsummers wrote 1 day ago:
Two significant prior discussions: [1] - 24 Jan 2015, 50 comments [2] -
22 Feb 2024, 434 comments
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820
HTML [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693
lstodd wrote 1 day ago:
> The combined expenditure of U.S. companies on management consul-
tants and training in 1997 was over $100 billion
erhm, if this figure is close to true i can see what market ai
companies is after.
jacques_chester wrote 1 day ago:
AI slots quite neatly into the capability trap model, actually.
Which loop it belongs to in the model is left as an exercise for the
reader.
DIR <- back to front page