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The part that struck me as particularly strange was: > he just said "the documentation sucks". My response to that was "uh, well, I figured it out, so how bad
by lhorie 9y ago
The part that struck me as particularly strange was:
> he just said "the documentation sucks". My response to that was "uh, well, I figured it out, so how bad could it be?".
Isn't common sense to update the documentation for how to do semi-obscure dev-opsy things and disseminate this information to the rest of the team?
There will always be some plumbing thing that you are the most familiar with; if you want the team to take shared responsibility, it's kinda up to you to bring it up and suggest rotation or whatever needs to be suggested to systematize the workload distribution.
- taneq 9y agoI interpreted her response as "the documentation is adequate, so the problem lies elsewhere."
- geggam 9y agoSame, her coworker also said they were aware of the issue but did nothing about it nor were they inclined to ask how to fix it.
- sidlls 9y agoWhy is her standard for "adequate" superior? We're to assume it is, apparently, but it isn't clear that it actually is adequate.
- taneq 9y agoWell she did figure it out from the documentation, so clearly it was adequate for her. Maybe she's just that much smarter and more competent than her colleagues, and what's adequate for her is not adequate for them, but if so then that somewhat justifies the frustration that caused her to run her little experiment in the first place.
- sidlls 9y agoIt doesn't justify her frustration at all. There is no indication she tried to help (e.g. by teaching, explaining the superiority of her method, etc.), ever. Her frustration would be justified if she'd been acting like a senior, experienced person and constantly met with ambivalence or incompetence, but there's no indication of that in this blog post. Her frustration absolutely does not justify her actions anyway so I'm not sure it's relevant.
- lhorie 9y agoI don't know, it could be interpreted both ways. FWIW, in my current job, documentation is plumbing I tend to own, even though it really is supposed to be a collective effort to improve it. There are people in my team that will be quick to say documentation is "adequate", even if it's missing some implicit knowledge. Rather than sulking and running sociopathic "experiments", I've found it to be more effective to keep advocating for more attentiveness to docs (by discussing it as a task prioritization item with the team, by setting examples, via code reviews, etc). If you continuously call it out when people drop the ball, and give constructive feedback when they attempt to take on the task in earnest, you gradually see better results.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoThe problem is that witch hunts tend to find people guilty, whether they are or not. She wasn't asking an honest question. She was trying to do a gotcha. My ex had some great expression along the lines of "It is a when did you stop beating your wife? question." In other words, the assumption of guilt runs so very deep, even when nominally trying to give you credit, it is damning. The framing does not allow for the possibility that you never stopped beating your wife because you never were a wife beater to begin with. She set out to prove her coworkers were bad. In other words, their badness was a foregone conclusion in her mind. She wasn't checking to see what they would do. It's entirely possible she had crap coworkers. But if she isn't management, managing her coworkers is not her job.
- taneq 9y agoI don't think it was a witch hunt, I think it was just "I'm sick of fixing this crap, let's see if anyone else will show an iota of initiative."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- diyseguy 9y agoThis is great, ty. I'm going to add this to my collection of 'words for when'. There are so many strange tricks that people pull on each other that are hard to concisely describe.