8 ms·

Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person's mistake

111 points by icey 17y ago

MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
I run a marketplace ( http://doleaf.com http://doleaf.com ) and this is something we try to get across to our sellers. Some of them have really draconian return policies, and maybe they have good reason. But, to the buyers, all kinds of "NO NO NO NO" all over the page is really a turn off.
- icey 17y ago
  This is kind of an aside, but if you get the time sometime, I'd love to see a blog post of how things are going with DoLeaf. I remember the posting about your beta awhile back, and it's good to see how much progress you've made since then.
  - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
    Ok, I'll try and put something together. One main thing we've learned in the past couple months: Social media marketing may be the talk of the town these days, but you just can't beat basic SEO for bootstrapping yourself to some sales.
  - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
    Ok, the post is up: http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progress http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progres... I also posted an item here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 Upvotes would be appreciated
gaius 17y ago
Tell that to the Marines.
- nzmsv 17y ago
  I think most customers don't expect a diner to be a boot camp :)
swombat 17y ago
Then again, sometimes, a few lonely rain drops can be the harbinger of a monsoon. It's worth having balance in this as in all things. Don't just shrug things off if it can go from an ignorable nuisance to a major disaster - but don't react emotionally to a perfectly rational problem.
lsc 17y ago
the other side of this is that you need to craft your services and policies so that you are not attractive to troublemakers. For example, at one time I had a 'first month free' policy. Good god. I think maybe 1 customer in 5 was legitimate, and my 95th percentile got absolutely destroyed (and this was back when I was paying sucker rates for bandwidth.)
electromagnetic 17y ago
If he'd ever worked in a cafe or coffee shop that didn't have those rules, he'd want them plastered up on the wall. First of all, you get the pissy customers who come in to take every one of life's problems out on someone who can't retaliate for fear of losing their job. Secondly, you get the customers who blatantly try to steal; they'll order ABC at $2.79 but when it's being made, they'll say they ordered DEF at $4.79 and that they're making the order wrong. The time to speak up isn't when you've paid and it's half-way made, it's when you visibly see them enter it wrong, however these people know it wasn't entered wrong. From time to time, you'll occasionally get a variant of type 1, who'll come into the store and order their coffee wrong (ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different), they'll then proceed to swear at the staff in front of a line of customers. As a customer, I've had to tell these people to leave before and I've seen several others who've had to do it; it's flat out being a bad person and when these people have shirts and ties and company logo's plastered on their vehicles, they deserve to be fired because I'll never use their company. I expect more out of someone in a business suit, and I frequently see worse language and behaviour than anyone else. I know for a fact that if I ran my own cafe/coffee shop, I'd have those exact rules. I wouldn't have them plastered on the wall, but they'd sure as hell be enforced on any jackasses who don't know how to behave in public. Life has rules and boundaries, and far too many people don't understand this. I was taught this in childhood, I assume everyone else was, but mature fully grown adults don't seem to grasp this. I've seen this behaviour in convenience stores and supermarkets, in the lobbies of companies and in high-end restaurants, and all of their responses are: please leave the premises, and in the case of the swearing psycho's they've had the police called on them. I've heard even more stories about this going on. So why a small diner can't enforce the same rules is well beyond me. I've seen at dentist offices that they'll kick out the people chatting or texting away on their blackberries for no other reason than it's annoying to both staff and the others waiting. There's an established etiquette in the world, just like there's an established etiquette on HN and anywhere. I don't go into a full-out swearing tirade against PG for some perceived wrong caused by myself, no one else does either. Why people believe they don't have to follow the rules is beyond me, and I believe these people should be punished to the full extent the law allows because the law is there to punish those that don't follow societally established rules and boundaries, AKA societal etiquette. If I try to rip you off, I expect you to deny me service. If I swear at you endlessly, I expect you to deny me service. If I'm misusing your property, I expect you to deny me service. I'm sorry, to me these are a given and don't need to be up on a wall. For way too many people, it's not a given.
pmorici 17y ago
Does the author live in San Fransisco? Because I see this phenomenon a lot in SF vs other places I've visited. Could have something to do with the abundance of homelessness in that city but the restrooms esp. seem to be locked down like Ft. Knox. For a city with such a liberal reputation they sure act like a bunch of A holes in that respect.
- whyenot 17y ago
  If SF weren't such a liberal city, it would have far fewer homeless. Part of the problem is all the services that San Francisco provides to people down on their luck. It makes the city a good place to live if you have nowhere to live. But some shop owners have lost their patience, and I don't blame them. I think I'd lose my patience too, after having to hose human feces off of the sidewalk outside my store several mornings in a row. In some parts of the city (like the Haight, anywhere near GG Park), it's gotten pretty bad.
  - pmorici 17y ago
    If there were more public bathrooms there would probably be a lot less shit on the streets.
    - whyenot 17y ago
      I'm talking about the corner of 9th and Irving. Golden Gate Park, and public restrooms are only two blocks away.
    - mattchew 17y ago
      Wait, a grown adult chooses to take a shit on the sidewalk and you want to blame someone else for this behavior? My cat has enough self respect to hold his feces if we accidentally close the door to the laundry room for a while.
      - pmorici 17y ago
        Do you think if they choose to crap in the woods in GG park that would be any better?
frossie 17y ago
This being HN, let's talk about software. I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by 9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building, instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am, because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be fired". So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this one.
- enjo 17y ago
  In one of my early post-college jobs I landed at a small startup. We had something like 6 employees at the time. As my wife was still in PhD school, I was commuting a pretty good distance. So I figured: "I'll just start every day at home, make the drive after rush hour and leave for home before rush hour hits." I was essentially in the office for about 5 hours a day. Lasted about a week before the MBA in the building pulled me aside and told me that wasn't going to work. The reason: the customer support guy also lived a long way out and he thought it wasn't fair that I was doing this. Of course, one of the very reasons I was drawn to programming in the first place was the flexibility it came with as a job. I could be productive from almost anywhere... and why shouldn't I be? From my perspective, if he didn't like it, well he should think about a career change. Now this was early 2002, which some might remember was a terrible time for actually finding jobs... so I reluctantly gave in. My commute went from roughly 30 minutes each way to 1-2 hours. I was miserable. That all changed after about a year as the company grew and I gradually slipped back into a better driving schedule. It's still something that sticks with me today. Now that I own the company, I promote a results oriented environment that gives everyone the flexibility to come and go as they please. Sure we sometimes have to get everyone together for meetings, but it's hardly been an issue so far.
spatulon 17y ago
Like with so many things in life, it helps to be the type of person who can take a step back and reflect objectively, rather than reflexively reacting to everything. It seems that far too many lack this ability, or at least haven't learned it. Offtopic: It's a small world. I went to the same little school as Derek, albeit much later. Now I know why we could only drink water at lunch.
10ren 17y ago
Making changes to addressing problems only when they occur is part of agile development. The problem here is that the change is an extreme one, that generalizes from one instance to all. But how do you tell how much you should generalize? A starting point is raw statistics: if you have 1000 customers, and 1 has this problem, should you fix it? Then, account for consequences: how serious is that one problem (what is its cost to you, to the person, to the community)? Finally, what are the knock-on effects, looking at the big overall picture: will addressing this problem improve your business overall, or undermine it? (sometimes, that 1 in a 1000 problem is a good excuse to fix something, or a signal to grow in that direction). Then, you can think about the best way to address the problem. Nasty prohibitive signs probably don't help; even nice prohibitive signs probably don't help either. Sometimes, you can reorganize how you do things so that the problem cannot occur (e.g. when training animals to not do something, you can train them to do something that is incompatible with the undesired action; e.g. floppy disks are shaped so that they cannot be inserted in the wrong way). The owner of a prominent software respository site told me that no matter what you write on forms - or how you highlight it - people will simply not read it. BTW: Sometimes the sign has underlining and exclamation marks added in a different colour, apparently upon second and third infractions. Exasperation marks.
smokey_the_bear 17y ago
Once I took a mini vacation up to a natural hot spring resort. I'd heard it was a relaxed, hippie-ish, communal living place. When we arrived there were just signs absolutely everywhere, in big letters at face level on all doors. Where to take your shoes off, where to be quiet, where to put your food in the kitchen, how to use the communal food shelves, where you had to wear clothes, where to line up for dinner. None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I wasn't sure about. Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should have had a sign about that.

111 points by icey 17y ago

I run a marketplace ( http://doleaf.com http://doleaf.com ) and this is something we try to get across to our sellers. Some of them have really draconian return policies, and maybe they have good reason. But, to the buyers, all kinds of "NO NO NO NO" all over the page is really a turn off.

icey 17y ago
This is kind of an aside, but if you get the time sometime, I'd love to see a blog post of how things are going with DoLeaf. I remember the posting about your beta awhile back, and it's good to see how much progress you've made since then.
- MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
  Ok, I'll try and put something together. One main thing we've learned in the past couple months: Social media marketing may be the talk of the town these days, but you just can't beat basic SEO for bootstrapping yourself to some sales.
- MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
  Ok, the post is up: http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progress http://blog.aisleten.com/2010/02/04/update-on-doleaf-progres... I also posted an item here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1100662 Upvotes would be appreciated

gaius 17y ago

Tell that to the Marines.

nzmsv 17y ago
I think most customers don't expect a diner to be a boot camp :)

swombat 17y ago

Then again, sometimes, a few lonely rain drops can be the harbinger of a monsoon. It's worth having balance in this as in all things. Don't just shrug things off if it can go from an ignorable nuisance to a major disaster - but don't react emotionally to a perfectly rational problem.

lsc 17y ago

the other side of this is that you need to craft your services and policies so that you are not attractive to troublemakers. For example, at one time I had a 'first month free' policy. Good god. I think maybe 1 customer in 5 was legitimate, and my 95th percentile got absolutely destroyed (and this was back when I was paying sucker rates for bandwidth.)

electromagnetic 17y ago

If he'd ever worked in a cafe or coffee shop that didn't have those rules, he'd want them plastered up on the wall. First of all, you get the pissy customers who come in to take every one of life's problems out on someone who can't retaliate for fear of losing their job. Secondly, you get the customers who blatantly try to steal; they'll order ABC at $2.79 but when it's being made, they'll say they ordered DEF at $4.79 and that they're making the order wrong. The time to speak up isn't when you've paid and it's half-way made, it's when you visibly see them enter it wrong, however these people know it wasn't entered wrong. From time to time, you'll occasionally get a variant of type 1, who'll come into the store and order their coffee wrong (ex. they want a black coffee, but they'll order 'coffee, no cream, no sugar', which means you'll get coffee one cream, one sugar, because a black coffee is a black coffee and isn't said any differently anywhere in the anglosphere, don't be different), they'll then proceed to swear at the staff in front of a line of customers. As a customer, I've had to tell these people to leave before and I've seen several others who've had to do it; it's flat out being a bad person and when these people have shirts and ties and company logo's plastered on their vehicles, they deserve to be fired because I'll never use their company. I expect more out of someone in a business suit, and I frequently see worse language and behaviour than anyone else. I know for a fact that if I ran my own cafe/coffee shop, I'd have those exact rules. I wouldn't have them plastered on the wall, but they'd sure as hell be enforced on any jackasses who don't know how to behave in public. Life has rules and boundaries, and far too many people don't understand this. I was taught this in childhood, I assume everyone else was, but mature fully grown adults don't seem to grasp this. I've seen this behaviour in convenience stores and supermarkets, in the lobbies of companies and in high-end restaurants, and all of their responses are: please leave the premises, and in the case of the swearing psycho's they've had the police called on them. I've heard even more stories about this going on. So why a small diner can't enforce the same rules is well beyond me. I've seen at dentist offices that they'll kick out the people chatting or texting away on their blackberries for no other reason than it's annoying to both staff and the others waiting. There's an established etiquette in the world, just like there's an established etiquette on HN and anywhere. I don't go into a full-out swearing tirade against PG for some perceived wrong caused by myself, no one else does either. Why people believe they don't have to follow the rules is beyond me, and I believe these people should be punished to the full extent the law allows because the law is there to punish those that don't follow societally established rules and boundaries, AKA societal etiquette. If I try to rip you off, I expect you to deny me service. If I swear at you endlessly, I expect you to deny me service. If I'm misusing your property, I expect you to deny me service. I'm sorry, to me these are a given and don't need to be up on a wall. For way too many people, it's not a given.

pmorici 17y ago

Does the author live in San Fransisco? Because I see this phenomenon a lot in SF vs other places I've visited. Could have something to do with the abundance of homelessness in that city but the restrooms esp. seem to be locked down like Ft. Knox. For a city with such a liberal reputation they sure act like a bunch of A holes in that respect.

whyenot 17y ago
If SF weren't such a liberal city, it would have far fewer homeless. Part of the problem is all the services that San Francisco provides to people down on their luck. It makes the city a good place to live if you have nowhere to live. But some shop owners have lost their patience, and I don't blame them. I think I'd lose my patience too, after having to hose human feces off of the sidewalk outside my store several mornings in a row. In some parts of the city (like the Haight, anywhere near GG Park), it's gotten pretty bad.
- pmorici 17y ago
  If there were more public bathrooms there would probably be a lot less shit on the streets.
  - whyenot 17y ago
    I'm talking about the corner of 9th and Irving. Golden Gate Park, and public restrooms are only two blocks away.
  - mattchew 17y ago
    Wait, a grown adult chooses to take a shit on the sidewalk and you want to blame someone else for this behavior? My cat has enough self respect to hold his feces if we accidentally close the door to the laundry room for a while.
    - pmorici 17y ago
      Do you think if they choose to crap in the woods in GG park that would be any better?

frossie 17y ago

This being HN, let's talk about software. I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by 9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building, instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am, because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be fired". So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this one.

enjo 17y ago
In one of my early post-college jobs I landed at a small startup. We had something like 6 employees at the time. As my wife was still in PhD school, I was commuting a pretty good distance. So I figured: "I'll just start every day at home, make the drive after rush hour and leave for home before rush hour hits." I was essentially in the office for about 5 hours a day. Lasted about a week before the MBA in the building pulled me aside and told me that wasn't going to work. The reason: the customer support guy also lived a long way out and he thought it wasn't fair that I was doing this. Of course, one of the very reasons I was drawn to programming in the first place was the flexibility it came with as a job. I could be productive from almost anywhere... and why shouldn't I be? From my perspective, if he didn't like it, well he should think about a career change. Now this was early 2002, which some might remember was a terrible time for actually finding jobs... so I reluctantly gave in. My commute went from roughly 30 minutes each way to 1-2 hours. I was miserable. That all changed after about a year as the company grew and I gradually slipped back into a better driving schedule. It's still something that sticks with me today. Now that I own the company, I promote a results oriented environment that gives everyone the flexibility to come and go as they please. Sure we sometimes have to get everyone together for meetings, but it's hardly been an issue so far.

spatulon 17y ago

Like with so many things in life, it helps to be the type of person who can take a step back and reflect objectively, rather than reflexively reacting to everything. It seems that far too many lack this ability, or at least haven't learned it. Offtopic: It's a small world. I went to the same little school as Derek, albeit much later. Now I know why we could only drink water at lunch.

10ren 17y ago

Making changes to addressing problems only when they occur is part of agile development. The problem here is that the change is an extreme one, that generalizes from one instance to all. But how do you tell how much you should generalize? A starting point is raw statistics: if you have 1000 customers, and 1 has this problem, should you fix it? Then, account for consequences: how serious is that one problem (what is its cost to you, to the person, to the community)? Finally, what are the knock-on effects, looking at the big overall picture: will addressing this problem improve your business overall, or undermine it? (sometimes, that 1 in a 1000 problem is a good excuse to fix something, or a signal to grow in that direction). Then, you can think about the best way to address the problem. Nasty prohibitive signs probably don't help; even nice prohibitive signs probably don't help either. Sometimes, you can reorganize how you do things so that the problem cannot occur (e.g. when training animals to not do something, you can train them to do something that is incompatible with the undesired action; e.g. floppy disks are shaped so that they cannot be inserted in the wrong way). The owner of a prominent software respository site told me that no matter what you write on forms - or how you highlight it - people will simply not read it. BTW: Sometimes the sign has underlining and exclamation marks added in a different colour, apparently upon second and third infractions. Exasperation marks.

smokey_the_bear 17y ago

Once I took a mini vacation up to a natural hot spring resort. I'd heard it was a relaxed, hippie-ish, communal living place. When we arrived there were just signs absolutely everywhere, in big letters at face level on all doors. Where to take your shoes off, where to be quiet, where to put your food in the kitchen, how to use the communal food shelves, where you had to wear clothes, where to line up for dinner. None of the things were unreasonable. Some seemed a little unnecessarily precise, but if it had been a more crowded weekend could have been more critical. Most were intuitive. But it made me uncomfortable. I'd expected to be able to settle in and find my own place there, but I just felt in the way due to all the signs. And anything that wasn't explicitly allowed by a sign I wasn't sure about. Also, I got a massage there. And when it was over the guy just stormed out without saying anything. I found out later that it's a style for ending massages, not saying anything to ruin the buzz of the massage experience. But I was very startled by it and thought I'd done something wrong. They should have had a sign about that.