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This is what I call the "Perfect World Fallacy". Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right. But that's not the reality we're living in – in particular,

by adwn 5y ago

This is what I call the "Perfect World Fallacy". Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right. But that's not the reality we're living in – in particular, that's not the reality small and young companies are living in. When you're scaling up, or when you're short on staff, and there are fires to be put out everywhere, you just don't have the capacity to design and test those perfect processes. Where are they supposed to come from? > layers of security and QA checks, with automated sanity checks on config and data Ha! I've never, ever seen any company which comes even close to that platonic ideal.

onion2k 5y ago
Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right. A lot of companies choose not to do process oriented work, and just wing it instead because they believe they can go faster. That's fine. It's a choice driven by resources. What's not fine is complaining that someone you hire is "bad" because they get stuff wrong when you're forcing them to work without a process-based safety net. People will always make mistakes. If your belief is that everyone should be perfect because you've chosen the no-safety route then you don't get to complain when someone nearly sinks the company. Expecting people never to get things wrong is unreasonable, and it's the exact reason why we have processes to catch problems.
- adwn 5y ago
  > If your belief is that everyone should be perfect [...] Well, you seem to believe there's such a thing as a perfect process. How is a non-perfect employee (or a group of non-perfect employees) supposed to come up with a perfect process? > [...] because you've chosen the no-safety route [...] Who said anything about no safety net? Maybe there was a process, or a safety net, but it wasn't perfect and didn't catch those mistakes?
- 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  I didn’t fire him because he made 2 mistakes. I fired him because I was giving him 10-15 hrs/week of coaching and mentorship and he wasn’t improving at all. The process that was bad was our interview process and our process change was changing our interview process.

by adwn 5y ago

onion2k 5y ago

Yes, in a perfect world, you'd be absolutely right. A lot of companies choose not to do process oriented work, and just wing it instead because they believe they can go faster. That's fine. It's a choice driven by resources. What's not fine is complaining that someone you hire is "bad" because they get stuff wrong when you're forcing them to work without a process-based safety net. People will always make mistakes. If your belief is that everyone should be perfect because you've chosen the no-safety route then you don't get to complain when someone nearly sinks the company. Expecting people never to get things wrong is unreasonable, and it's the exact reason why we have processes to catch problems.

adwn 5y ago
> If your belief is that everyone should be perfect [...] Well, you seem to believe there's such a thing as a perfect process. How is a non-perfect employee (or a group of non-perfect employees) supposed to come up with a perfect process? > [...] because you've chosen the no-safety route [...] Who said anything about no safety net? Maybe there was a process, or a safety net, but it wasn't perfect and didn't catch those mistakes?
0xB31B1B 5y ago
I didn’t fire him because he made 2 mistakes. I fired him because I was giving him 10-15 hrs/week of coaching and mentorship and he wasn’t improving at all. The process that was bad was our interview process and our process change was changing our interview process.