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I definitely felt this decades ago when I started in the industry. It's 2019 now though. only 8 years later, but a lot of things changed. The industry is grow
by shados 7y ago
I definitely felt this decades ago when I started in the industry.
It's 2019 now though. only 8 years later, but a lot of things changed.
The industry is growing fast, faster than knowledge can be shared even with all the power of the internet. It's very bottom up, with newer engineers severely outnumbering those that have been around. People are making fat salaries and companies are catering to their whims. They/we're more spoiled than they've ever been. People go to work hoping they'll be find a reason today to try the latest pattern they saw on Twitter or try the trendy new tech or library their friend just talked about.
If you don't have people saying no, it quickly (very quickly) get out of control. As organizations grow, you need to start saying no. A lot. Else within 0.2 seconds of the new intern joining or the new grad coming in, or the lateral hire who was the king of their 5 people startup will be pushing some stuff that isn't mature enough or doesn't follow established patterns. More often, they'll be reintroducing something problematic that you just finished getting rid of 6 months ago.
It sucks. Sure, there are some power hungry people who get off on power trip by being gate keepers. But overall, it's just people desperately trying to keep things in one piece and the company going, and that means making hard decisions and enforcing them. It just doesn't feel good to say no, arguing all day with people who have way more energy than you do, but it has to be done.
- james_in_the_uk 7y agoI have to say "no" a lot in my role. Thank you for this post.
- deleted_account 7y ago"Chesterton's fence".
- hinkley 7y agoChesterton's fence is about taking away things we don't understand. There's a big gap between that and fighting cargo culting.
- mark-r 7y agoBut you really don't know if it's cargo culting until you know why the fence is there.
- dredmorbius 7y agoCF is about, generally, changing a thing without understanding why it was set a given way in the first place. Where it is necessary to change (or to make changes) without full understanding, at the very least, instrument and observe for some time. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
- hinkley 7y agoYes, about changing the status quo. Aping someone else's fancy, new solution is not the status quo. You have no way of knowing how badly they have steamrolled Chesterton's Fence.
- shados 7y agoThe opposite. In this case people saying no are the ones understanding, and people complaining about them are the ones who don't have the full context. Of course the job of the people saying no becomes to document this, but at large enough scale its hard to get people to read the documentation...(and even when they do, its hard to internalize it).
- novok 7y agoThat is why you write that in a standards document, along with the reasons why and have a consensus about it. That way it becomes impersonal. Same thing with auto formatters and linters sidestepping a lot of pointless bickering and bike shedding.
- shados 7y agoThat works for things you want to DO, but is hard for things you DON'T want to do. As I mentioned in another post, as your org grows, there's going to be an infinite amount of things people push, and pushing back is hard. If you have to stop and write a consensus document for every single one, you'll be doing nothing else.
- icxa 7y agoHow hard is it to say "these are the types of things we want to do. anything must look like these types of things in terms of (insert x y and z criteria: size, scale, opportunity, profitability, growth, etc) spoiler alert: it isn't hard and this is what we do at my startup that is currently experiencing hyper growth and is on multiple "unicorn" lists
- drunkpotato 7y agoAhh hahahahahahaha! Sorry. I had a more substantive comment but it drowned in ignorance and inexperience.
- stringyham 7y agoYou could have just refrained from posting.
- shados 7y agoI can't even tell if it's satire. But if it's not: I haven't see it be done easily over several hundred engineers. If you have that kind of charisma, hat off to you!
- monksy 7y ago> it quickly (very quickly) get out of control javascript
- shados 7y agoJavaScript is indeed a very good example of this. Not just in the ecosystem, but even just the standard itself. People are pushing for more and more stuff. People on the committee can say "no", but there's an infinite amount of bullshit to push, and only a limited amount of time to push back. So sooner or later, bullshit makes it in.
- rbavocadotree 7y agoWhat are examples of bs in the javascript standard?
- heavenlyblue 7y agoJavaScript
- zzo38computer 7y agoAutomatic semicolon insertion
- lr4444lr 7y agoString (capital "S") class.
- nailer 7y agoWhy don't you like Strings? All prototypes (Number, Array etc) have a capital letter.
- zzo38computer 7y agoI think that it is good. These functions for primitives (String, Number, etc) are good, one thing sometimes to call it, and also because of the prototype. Also, there is such thing as String.prototype.constructor and Number.prototype.constructor and so on, which I have used for parsing command-line arguments (to replace the default values with the user values, converted to the correct type).
- CoolGuySteve 7y agoI've had the opposite experience. Working for a "no guy" who was hired fresh out of school, stayed at the same place for 8 years or whatever, and then blocked anything anyone learned from working somewhere else. We started to wonder if his blocking of everything was just pathological because the tech stack wasn't all that great.
- hos234 7y agoTim Cook agrees - "The hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on. There is lots of things we'd like to work on but we can't do everything great. Most companies do larger and larger portfolios because its so easy to add. It gets hard to stay focused. Yet we know, we can only do our best work if we stay focused"
- arcticbull 7y agoThere's a big difference between saying "no" to the right things (valuable) and a borderline oppositional personality disorder (not valuable). There's an art to saying no. Ideally you look for ways to say yes, and try and distill the nuggets of value and work them into your future plans while acknowledging that now may not be the right time to pursue them. Or nerd-sniping them with other ideas to leverage their enthusiasm and bright-eyed/bushy-tailed attitudes. Likely they're just looking for impact and don't know how to get it. Otherwise you're kind of a dick, and nobody wants to work with that. Unless you're in charge and they can't get away, I guess.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sidlls 7y agoEven before I became the manager, as a Lead I felt half my time was explaining to younger, less experienced engineers why "no, we should not" introduce something. And it really was an explanation, not a condescending or dismissive refusal. That part is key.
- no_wizard 7y agoI wish more places understood this. Change of leadership where I am is causing so many issues because there isn't any substantiated reasons why something is a 'no'. Its just 'no', and attempts to get clarifications and how to proceed in the future are met with little clarification (and sometimes ignored altogether)
- tasuki 7y agoAll while you're the "no wizard" ;)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]