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I’m grateful for Christine. I had the pleasure of working with them before, and one of the things I appreciate is their openness around idea sharing. Talking ab

I’m grateful for Christine. I had the pleasure of working with them before, and one of the things I appreciate is their openness around idea sharing. Talking about tarot or other woo-woo stuff, even philosophically, is hard in tech circles and posts like this continue to make inroads in dulling the negativity.

amerine 7y ago
For me, it’s tarot is almost just like oblique strategies.
reificator 7y ago
> Talking about tarot or other woo-woo stuff, even philosophically, is hard in tech circles and posts like this continue to make inroads in dulling the negativity. I mean, you can talk about reading tarot at home and I'll support your hobby. No problems there, I'll ask you what you've done with it recently with genuine interest, and I'm not going to even think about saying you shouldn't do what you enjoy. But you talk about using tarot for debugging at work, there's basically no chance I'll ever take you seriously again. I apologize for my negativity for not wanting to use tarot cards for debugging or a Ouija board for requirements gathering.
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  It's just a form of rubber ducking. Frankly, a Ouija board for requirements gathering might be a lot less mysterious and esoteric than some of the scrum practices I've seen...
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    Plus, if it works, who cares? It's a bit strange to have an objection to a thing based on the idea that it's impossible. I once objected to the idea that colors look fundamentally different in darkness than in light. When put like that, it's kind of silly to imagine that one could object to it. But my objection was mostly to do with the way it was presented: Someone told me to stare at a picture and let my brain "buy into it." I was younger and practically laughed it off. But sure enough, after actually doing it, the picture looked much more vivid. One possibility presents itself as to why Tarot debugging might be effective: Perhaps it gets you to try more things than you otherwise would have. The post begins: envision the product or service you are trying to understand more about. Think of the plans that went into it, the users of the service, how this understanding will help them, and where the missing part of knowledge fits into the larger whole. Write this all out if it helps, the more detail the better. So, user stories. Right? From further down: draw The Action. This card will help you decide what action you need to take. This could be restarting a server, fixing a communication pattern (or lack thereof), or even just doing nothing and waiting a few minutes. Sometimes it means that you need to stop what you are doing and try to do the read again later. It’s okay for that to happen, though that should only be a very rare occurrence. This sounds pretty similar to ad-hoc debugging techniques I've seen. I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent chance of being effective. I kind of want to go the other direction and make a deck of cards for debugging. You shuffle the deck, draw a few cards, and see if you've tried all the techniques it mentions. You could even have decks for designing systems, refactoring code, etc. It seems like there's a deeper disconnect here: We want to believe so badly that programming is scientific work. But it's craftsmanship. Are these rituals really so much stranger than the rituals of Japanese swordsmiths? Why engrave a sword with such embellishment when it serves no functional purpose? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/File:Wakizashi_horimono.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/...
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      > I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent chance of being effective. Yeah, restart the malfunctioning thing and throw away what precious state you had for meaningful debugging of a potentially hard to reproduce problem. If I ever encounter someone guiding their engineering or administration tasks with tarot cards somewhere I have the authority to, they'll be promptly dismissed.
      - sillysaurusx 7y ago
        You can say that about any aspect of debugging: "Yeah, avoid restarting the server and limp along at 10% performance in hopes of debugging the spaghetti code that some intern wrote over the weekend." No one was recommending throwing away state that might help you debug a problem. But I think that there are people who will dislike the idea of controlled randomness regardless of any merits, counterexamples, or evidence in support of its effectiveness. Doctors hated the idea that washing their hands would save lives, because it implied they had been doing their jobs wrong their entire lives.
      - geofft 7y ago
        Restarting the server because the tarot deck said to is certainly a way better reason than the ones I occasionally see in practice - e.g., "because the uptime was unusually high and that seemed suspicious," well did you suspect that it was manually configured and nobody was rebooting it for a reason? That one is an actively bad reason to reboot a server during an outage, at least the tarot deck isn't making decisions contrary to evidence. Also, if you read the article closely, it's not advising you to trust the deck blindly, it's advising you to use it as a way to think about the problem from a new angle. If you're restarting it blindly based on a tarot deck, you're the sort of sysadmin who's ready to restart it blindly based on finding a five-year-old wiki page with a vaguely similar error message on a totally different platform. Should that be a fireable offense? (Maybe! Or at least maybe the company should find you a different role that recognizes that making decisions about production servers is not actually one of your skills.)
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    I would like to hear more about those practices if possible ;)
- xena 7y ago
  Author here. Give me a tool that works better to understand Kubernetes than a tarot deck and I'll use it happily.
daenz 7y ago
Placebos have been scientifically proven to be effective in many circumstances, including when the patient knows they took a placebo. But if my workplace started handing out magical "productivity-increasing" placebo pills and some people defended the practice by saying to stop being so negative and be more open-minded, I would leave. Part of our jobs in tech is to minimize the bullshit to its absolute smallest possible surface area, not embrace it and pretend, with the power of imagination, that it's a good thing.
- gbear605 7y ago
  What if all the employees who took the placebo pills were more productive? It’s still a sugar pills, but you can’t argue with the results.
  - daenz 7y ago
    And what if I told those employees that the water in the building has been shown to invert the effect of the placebo pills and make them less productive? Now their productivity goes down. See how this can go wrong? Buying into the bullshit and tying your abilities to something as flimsy as a placebo pill is not a great idea.
    - xena 7y ago
      If anything, belief is a powerful tool.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
xena 7y ago
OP of the article here. To be honest, I miss working with you. I've been working on a few more "woo-woo" things for a number of years that I've been unsure how to properly approach in a work setting (but do actually use it as an advantage in a work setting). Been working on a book for it for years. DM me on Twitter (@theprincessxena) if you want a link. It's actually really hard to be open enough to talk about this kind of stuff in a work setting. It's easy to let fear of being labeled the "weird one" stop you, even when nothing else prevents you. However, when you do get known as the "weird one", you can get away with saying basically anything without people questioning it too much (EG: "it's Christine, she's weird, I don't have to care about $THING").

amerine 7y ago

For me, it’s tarot is almost just like oblique strategies.

reificator 7y ago

> Talking about tarot or other woo-woo stuff, even philosophically, is hard in tech circles and posts like this continue to make inroads in dulling the negativity. I mean, you can talk about reading tarot at home and I'll support your hobby. No problems there, I'll ask you what you've done with it recently with genuine interest, and I'm not going to even think about saying you shouldn't do what you enjoy. But you talk about using tarot for debugging at work, there's basically no chance I'll ever take you seriously again. I apologize for my negativity for not wanting to use tarot cards for debugging or a Ouija board for requirements gathering.

vorpalhex 7y ago
It's just a form of rubber ducking. Frankly, a Ouija board for requirements gathering might be a lot less mysterious and esoteric than some of the scrum practices I've seen...
- sillysaurusx 7y ago
  Plus, if it works, who cares? It's a bit strange to have an objection to a thing based on the idea that it's impossible. I once objected to the idea that colors look fundamentally different in darkness than in light. When put like that, it's kind of silly to imagine that one could object to it. But my objection was mostly to do with the way it was presented: Someone told me to stare at a picture and let my brain "buy into it." I was younger and practically laughed it off. But sure enough, after actually doing it, the picture looked much more vivid. One possibility presents itself as to why Tarot debugging might be effective: Perhaps it gets you to try more things than you otherwise would have. The post begins: envision the product or service you are trying to understand more about. Think of the plans that went into it, the users of the service, how this understanding will help them, and where the missing part of knowledge fits into the larger whole. Write this all out if it helps, the more detail the better. So, user stories. Right? From further down: draw The Action. This card will help you decide what action you need to take. This could be restarting a server, fixing a communication pattern (or lack thereof), or even just doing nothing and waiting a few minutes. Sometimes it means that you need to stop what you are doing and try to do the read again later. It’s okay for that to happen, though that should only be a very rare occurrence. This sounds pretty similar to ad-hoc debugging techniques I've seen. I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent chance of being effective. I kind of want to go the other direction and make a deck of cards for debugging. You shuffle the deck, draw a few cards, and see if you've tried all the techniques it mentions. You could even have decks for designing systems, refactoring code, etc. It seems like there's a deeper disconnect here: We want to believe so badly that programming is scientific work. But it's craftsmanship. Are these rituals really so much stranger than the rituals of Japanese swordsmiths? Why engrave a sword with such embellishment when it serves no functional purpose? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/File:Wakizashi_horimono.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#/media/...
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    > I'm not saying it's a great idea to, y'know, restart a production service based on a card telling you. But on the other hand, have you tried restarting it to see if that helps? Who among us hasn't tried that, honestly? And being told to do it just to see what happens seems like it has a decent chance of being effective. Yeah, restart the malfunctioning thing and throw away what precious state you had for meaningful debugging of a potentially hard to reproduce problem. If I ever encounter someone guiding their engineering or administration tasks with tarot cards somewhere I have the authority to, they'll be promptly dismissed.
    - sillysaurusx 7y ago
      You can say that about any aspect of debugging: "Yeah, avoid restarting the server and limp along at 10% performance in hopes of debugging the spaghetti code that some intern wrote over the weekend." No one was recommending throwing away state that might help you debug a problem. But I think that there are people who will dislike the idea of controlled randomness regardless of any merits, counterexamples, or evidence in support of its effectiveness. Doctors hated the idea that washing their hands would save lives, because it implied they had been doing their jobs wrong their entire lives.
    - geofft 7y ago
      Restarting the server because the tarot deck said to is certainly a way better reason than the ones I occasionally see in practice - e.g., "because the uptime was unusually high and that seemed suspicious," well did you suspect that it was manually configured and nobody was rebooting it for a reason? That one is an actively bad reason to reboot a server during an outage, at least the tarot deck isn't making decisions contrary to evidence. Also, if you read the article closely, it's not advising you to trust the deck blindly, it's advising you to use it as a way to think about the problem from a new angle. If you're restarting it blindly based on a tarot deck, you're the sort of sysadmin who's ready to restart it blindly based on finding a five-year-old wiki page with a vaguely similar error message on a totally different platform. Should that be a fireable offense? (Maybe! Or at least maybe the company should find you a different role that recognizes that making decisions about production servers is not actually one of your skills.)
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  I would like to hear more about those practices if possible ;)
xena 7y ago
Author here. Give me a tool that works better to understand Kubernetes than a tarot deck and I'll use it happily.

daenz 7y ago

Placebos have been scientifically proven to be effective in many circumstances, including when the patient knows they took a placebo. But if my workplace started handing out magical "productivity-increasing" placebo pills and some people defended the practice by saying to stop being so negative and be more open-minded, I would leave. Part of our jobs in tech is to minimize the bullshit to its absolute smallest possible surface area, not embrace it and pretend, with the power of imagination, that it's a good thing.

gbear605 7y ago
What if all the employees who took the placebo pills were more productive? It’s still a sugar pills, but you can’t argue with the results.
- daenz 7y ago
  And what if I told those employees that the water in the building has been shown to invert the effect of the placebo pills and make them less productive? Now their productivity goes down. See how this can go wrong? Buying into the bullshit and tying your abilities to something as flimsy as a placebo pill is not a great idea.
  - xena 7y ago
    If anything, belief is a powerful tool.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

xena 7y ago

OP of the article here. To be honest, I miss working with you. I've been working on a few more "woo-woo" things for a number of years that I've been unsure how to properly approach in a work setting (but do actually use it as an advantage in a work setting). Been working on a book for it for years. DM me on Twitter (@theprincessxena) if you want a link. It's actually really hard to be open enough to talk about this kind of stuff in a work setting. It's easy to let fear of being labeled the "weird one" stop you, even when nothing else prevents you. However, when you do get known as the "weird one", you can get away with saying basically anything without people questioning it too much (EG: "it's Christine, she's weird, I don't have to care about $THING").