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When I say stupidity I don't mean mistakes. From the article: > At that point, it was decided that something easier had to be done. The barrier to entry for s

When I say stupidity I don't mean mistakes. From the article: > At that point, it was decided that something easier had to be done. The barrier to entry for safe and sane rollouts had to be lowered even more to bring more teams on board. Why does something have to be easy for a team of professional software engineers to do it correctly? Make things easier to improve productivity, sure, but in my opinion awkward/difficult/complex tooling isn't a license to cut corners.

joshuamorton 6y ago
When you serve hundreds or thousands of teams, as this tool did, one of them is bound to be lazy. Defaults should be safe.
ratww 6y ago
> Make things easier to improve productivity, sure, but in my opinion awkward/difficult/complex tooling isn't a license to cut corners. In practice it ends up being more like a request. :)
hinkley 6y ago
If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day long, you're the asshole. I can think of a few current or former coworkers who talk about how everybody is an idiot and they are the biggest idiots I know. Insisting people use a tool that is capable of doing dangerous things correctly, every time, is white-knuckling. Yelling at them about screwing it up is running your organization by shame. When you do that, eventually only the people with very high pain tolerance ever get promoted, or even heard. Do you really want to work on a team run by masochists/sadists? Similar to make the change easy, make the easy change, if you want to have a dialog with people about doing better, the easiest way to do that is to give them a reliable tool (literal or figurative), and then start insisting they use it when it becomes obvious they haven't. The people who insist on doing things the hardest way possible can still do it as long as nobody else feels the consequences. But typically what they're going to learn is that where self-reflection is concerned, they're bad at math and they have way more frequent problems and far more collateral damage than they like to tell themselves.
- aahortwwy 6y ago
  There are a few strawmen in this post. 1. I never said everybody is stupid. The vast majority of people in Big Tech are great, but there ARE stupid people there too. I resent the implication of your first paragraph. 2. Who said anything about yelling or other toxic behaviors? There are options other than "engineer a foolproof system" and "institute a sado-masochistic management strategy". 3. I never advocated for doing things the hardest way possible, I advocated for doing things correctly (to the best of your ability) even when it is difficult to do so. The example given in the article is a team choosing to do a global rollout when the option existed to do a staged rollout. There's myriad technical things you can do to make it easier and faster to do a staged rollout, harder to do a global rollout, reduce the risk of a global rollout, etc. etc. ... but what about instilling a healthy respect for production in your colleagues? That's been conspicuously absent from most postmortems I've sat in on.

joshuamorton 6y ago

When you serve hundreds or thousands of teams, as this tool did, one of them is bound to be lazy. Defaults should be safe.

ratww 6y ago

> Make things easier to improve productivity, sure, but in my opinion awkward/difficult/complex tooling isn't a license to cut corners. In practice it ends up being more like a request. :)

hinkley 6y ago

If you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole. If you meet assholes all day long, you're the asshole. I can think of a few current or former coworkers who talk about how everybody is an idiot and they are the biggest idiots I know. Insisting people use a tool that is capable of doing dangerous things correctly, every time, is white-knuckling. Yelling at them about screwing it up is running your organization by shame. When you do that, eventually only the people with very high pain tolerance ever get promoted, or even heard. Do you really want to work on a team run by masochists/sadists? Similar to make the change easy, make the easy change, if you want to have a dialog with people about doing better, the easiest way to do that is to give them a reliable tool (literal or figurative), and then start insisting they use it when it becomes obvious they haven't. The people who insist on doing things the hardest way possible can still do it as long as nobody else feels the consequences. But typically what they're going to learn is that where self-reflection is concerned, they're bad at math and they have way more frequent problems and far more collateral damage than they like to tell themselves.

aahortwwy 6y ago
There are a few strawmen in this post. 1. I never said everybody is stupid. The vast majority of people in Big Tech are great, but there ARE stupid people there too. I resent the implication of your first paragraph. 2. Who said anything about yelling or other toxic behaviors? There are options other than "engineer a foolproof system" and "institute a sado-masochistic management strategy". 3. I never advocated for doing things the hardest way possible, I advocated for doing things correctly (to the best of your ability) even when it is difficult to do so. The example given in the article is a team choosing to do a global rollout when the option existed to do a staged rollout. There's myriad technical things you can do to make it easier and faster to do a staged rollout, harder to do a global rollout, reduce the risk of a global rollout, etc. etc. ... but what about instilling a healthy respect for production in your colleagues? That's been conspicuously absent from most postmortems I've sat in on.