6 ms·

It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simpl

It's a problem with many developers. They think that because there can be a root cause analysis, they didn't fuck up. But there are times when something simply shouldn't be, definitionally. As in, if X happens, it doesn't matter what the root cause analysis is, something is wrong. To give a real life example, if you're driving drunk, the events and reasons leading up to the act don't really matter. They're not without value, but they're not important for determining that someone fucked up. This is what the poster you're responding to is saying. That the problems are so goddamned egregious that they simply shouldn't be. It's not up to the aforementioned poster to fix the problems, it's up to the companies in question wanting to be better.

aflag 6y ago
Fair point, but that's obviously not true. All evidence we have points to both amazon and google following excelent software development practices. They are even drivers of good practices in certain parts. So, we'd need stronger evidence to show that they are not doing their due diligence before releasing new versions. I'd say that releasing software without tests, code review and incremental rollout would be akin to drunk driving. However, I believe they do all of that and more. Moreover, I don't know about the many developers you have experience with, but if the developer considers the behaviour to be a bug, I have a hard time believing they don't consider the behaviour to be a failure (ie. someone made a mistake somewhere). Though, I can definitely see people shifting the responsability to someone else, specially if there's a blame culture in place. Obviously, that's easier to do once you know the root cause. However, a company will be better off by putting solid QA practices in place and measuring "fuck ups" as a decrease in productivity instead of measuring it as the number of times each developer break production.
- simion314 6y ago
  Maybe the issue they are doing too much dev and less contact with real users. You can unit test all your code but you can't cover all possible real data, so you need to accept user feedback. Sometime ago in one of our products there was an issue with RTL languages, as a developer it was first time I hit this concept, I got the report, I informed myself, I fixed the issue,the ticket was closed,the user was happy. In this case it is clear the developer assumed that they can always find someone picture, the assumption is wrong but probably all the TDD and good dev practices won't catch this issue until someone listens to the user reports.
  - aflag 6y ago
    Google does offer a feedback button in the knowledge panel. However, I assume they are unlikely to take any actions unless there's at least a certain amount of agreeing feedback.
    - simion314 6y ago
      I am wondering if they also put an algorithm to decide when "a certain amount of agreeing feedback" is reached. But TBH compared to other search engines Google is much better in general, my doubts are on the "summary" Google is doing presenting stuff as fact instead to just link you to the source directly.
  - RandoHolmes 6y ago
    ^ exactly this.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    I think they are passive aggressively telling you something essentially. The public complaints bin would wind up such a useless cesspool of entitled idiots and nuts complaining about "bias" because it doesn't conform to their warped worldview or issues that aren't even theirs like slow boot times. Actually processing that would be a massive sisphyean task with little actual gains from it. You know the "fire your bad 20% of customers that take 80% of your time" advice? Their numbers at large are looking far worse so just didn't hire them preemptively essentially. Strategically it makes no sense to do so.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  ^ this is exactly the attitude I'm referring to. Let me give you an anecdote to further illustrate. Last friday my internet went out (Cox) and I called into support. The first thing the guy told me? My equipment is too old. This is simply unacceptable as a reason why my internet stopped working at 6 in the morning. I suspect it was an attempt to upsell me a new modem, but I have a docsys 3 that's under 5 years old. It doesn't matter. Any series of events that results in technical support leading with blaming "old equipment" on the outage is wrong, period. Maybe the equipment went bad, it happens, but that's not what you lead with. Certainly not before trouble shooting. This is what I mean when I say "definitionally". It doesn't matter what their motivation is. It doesn't matter if it's possible that my equipment died. That employee fucked up. This isn't about technical excellence or software practices. This is about decision making.
  - aflag 6y ago
    I'm not sure if that employee fucked up. That may be company policy. Support people usually follow a script and they very rarely venture much beyond that. Partially because they lack technical knowledge and partially because it could actually get them in trouble. If I understand it correctly and you were calling your ISP at 6am, I don't think the person you were talking to was a developer. That said, I have no expertise in customer relations, so I wouldn't know if they were following good practices or not in that instance. I get your point that people make bad decisions, but in software development, those bad decisions shouldn't break the user experience, but decrease the developer's (and/or the team's) productivity instead. Doing root cause analysis is part of the process to achieve that, as it can give insight on how to avoid that class of problems in future. That said, if someone is not doing a good job, they'd hopefully figure it out by themselves, but constructive feedback can also go a long way. Ultimately, if you have a good process in place, it should help you to make an educated assessment of who is underperforming (eg.: their PRs take very long to merge, they are full of beginner's mistakes, their code is never properly tested, their releases are always rolled back a few times until they get it right, etc). All of that without playing the blame game on the (hopefully) rare ocasion that a major bug is found in production.
    - 6y ago

aflag 6y ago

Fair point, but that's obviously not true. All evidence we have points to both amazon and google following excelent software development practices. They are even drivers of good practices in certain parts. So, we'd need stronger evidence to show that they are not doing their due diligence before releasing new versions. I'd say that releasing software without tests, code review and incremental rollout would be akin to drunk driving. However, I believe they do all of that and more. Moreover, I don't know about the many developers you have experience with, but if the developer considers the behaviour to be a bug, I have a hard time believing they don't consider the behaviour to be a failure (ie. someone made a mistake somewhere). Though, I can definitely see people shifting the responsability to someone else, specially if there's a blame culture in place. Obviously, that's easier to do once you know the root cause. However, a company will be better off by putting solid QA practices in place and measuring "fuck ups" as a decrease in productivity instead of measuring it as the number of times each developer break production.

simion314 6y ago
Maybe the issue they are doing too much dev and less contact with real users. You can unit test all your code but you can't cover all possible real data, so you need to accept user feedback. Sometime ago in one of our products there was an issue with RTL languages, as a developer it was first time I hit this concept, I got the report, I informed myself, I fixed the issue,the ticket was closed,the user was happy. In this case it is clear the developer assumed that they can always find someone picture, the assumption is wrong but probably all the TDD and good dev practices won't catch this issue until someone listens to the user reports.
- aflag 6y ago
  Google does offer a feedback button in the knowledge panel. However, I assume they are unlikely to take any actions unless there's at least a certain amount of agreeing feedback.
  - simion314 6y ago
    I am wondering if they also put an algorithm to decide when "a certain amount of agreeing feedback" is reached. But TBH compared to other search engines Google is much better in general, my doubts are on the "summary" Google is doing presenting stuff as fact instead to just link you to the source directly.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  ^ exactly this.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I think they are passive aggressively telling you something essentially. The public complaints bin would wind up such a useless cesspool of entitled idiots and nuts complaining about "bias" because it doesn't conform to their warped worldview or issues that aren't even theirs like slow boot times. Actually processing that would be a massive sisphyean task with little actual gains from it. You know the "fire your bad 20% of customers that take 80% of your time" advice? Their numbers at large are looking far worse so just didn't hire them preemptively essentially. Strategically it makes no sense to do so.
RandoHolmes 6y ago
^ this is exactly the attitude I'm referring to. Let me give you an anecdote to further illustrate. Last friday my internet went out (Cox) and I called into support. The first thing the guy told me? My equipment is too old. This is simply unacceptable as a reason why my internet stopped working at 6 in the morning. I suspect it was an attempt to upsell me a new modem, but I have a docsys 3 that's under 5 years old. It doesn't matter. Any series of events that results in technical support leading with blaming "old equipment" on the outage is wrong, period. Maybe the equipment went bad, it happens, but that's not what you lead with. Certainly not before trouble shooting. This is what I mean when I say "definitionally". It doesn't matter what their motivation is. It doesn't matter if it's possible that my equipment died. That employee fucked up. This isn't about technical excellence or software practices. This is about decision making.
- aflag 6y ago
  I'm not sure if that employee fucked up. That may be company policy. Support people usually follow a script and they very rarely venture much beyond that. Partially because they lack technical knowledge and partially because it could actually get them in trouble. If I understand it correctly and you were calling your ISP at 6am, I don't think the person you were talking to was a developer. That said, I have no expertise in customer relations, so I wouldn't know if they were following good practices or not in that instance. I get your point that people make bad decisions, but in software development, those bad decisions shouldn't break the user experience, but decrease the developer's (and/or the team's) productivity instead. Doing root cause analysis is part of the process to achieve that, as it can give insight on how to avoid that class of problems in future. That said, if someone is not doing a good job, they'd hopefully figure it out by themselves, but constructive feedback can also go a long way. Ultimately, if you have a good process in place, it should help you to make an educated assessment of who is underperforming (eg.: their PRs take very long to merge, they are full of beginner's mistakes, their code is never properly tested, their releases are always rolled back a few times until they get it right, etc). All of that without playing the blame game on the (hopefully) rare ocasion that a major bug is found in production.
  - 6y ago