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Things to say when you're losing a technical argument (2001)
- ridruejo 5y agoOh man this brings back memories. I had a good laugh with this in the past, tried recently to find it and I couldn’t. Thanks for rescuing a classic. Another from circa the same time was “action item man”
- shrimpx 5y agoThis could be named “Things to say to defuse the overeducated clueless self-entitled newb who is toxically ramming his lame ideas into the team” :-)
- kwertyoowiyop 5y agoAnd then…I looked in the mirror! :-)
- cheese_van 5y agoMy section's inside joke was to tell management that whatever network failure of the day we were experiencing was attributable to "artifacts". "The artifact may have dependencies and we're analyzing those now, Sir." Especially useful when you've upgraded and it all goes to hell. Those damned artifacts will get you every time.
- arafalov 5y agoHad to search a couple of them (extropian and widow's son). Also, I had the whitepaper one thrown at me several times. Maybe I will use it myself next time. My own contribution would be: *) This would violate Accessibility requirements
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- i_like_apis 5y agoAdding: "That isn't PEP8"
- drawqrtz 5y agoIs there a slackbot that I can use to just auto reply these to request?
- ketralnis 5y agoYes, but can this be embedded in a toaster, for example?
- moffkalast 5y agoThere are, of course, various export limitations on that technology.
- jrace 5y agoI like your idea. Why don't you write up a white paper and we'll review it at the next staff meeting? That is a sure-fire way to stop most people.
- dekhn 5y agoThis is a great idea. Can you write a design doc? Please make sure it's fully fleshed out.
- Frost1x 5y agoI've actually had this happen, so I pretty much wrote a white paper (charging company time and delegating time from dedicated efforts by way of the name of the person who requested it). I sent it, then continually followed up on the status of the points made. Some changes ultimately did get integrated because of it, I think calling the bluff forced someone to actively read, think, and respond to it, even if it wasn't leadership, they had someone else spot check and agree/disagree on points.
- divbzero 5y agoThere’s something to be said for corporate cultures that require written memos describing each new proposal. Forcing people to “actively read, think, and respond” is a great way to increase the likelihood that the best ideas bubble up to the top.
- shoto_io 5y agoAFAIK amazon is pretty well-known for that? Some say it was key to their success story.
- bobthechef 5y agoIndeed. It cuts down on impulsive and thoughtless decisions.
- csydas 5y ago> Forcing people to “actively read, think, and respond” is a great way to increase the likelihood that the best ideas bubble up to the top. I think that it requires acknowledgment that there are two sides to such issues; as someone who is on the side that typically ends up having to handle the majority of the busy work to get many proposal through in my company I absolutely want the proposer to make the effort to figure out the stakeholders/costs/challenges for their project as well as answers. I'm willing to __fill in gaps__, but I don't really want to be having to do the basic legwork for someone else's project. I don't mean to sound like I want to stifle inconvenient creativity; it's certainly not the case, and when someone has really taken the time to make some new tooling/project with benefits and acknowledges the costs involved, I'm more than happy to champion such projects. But when someone just has a desire (or disparagingly, a whim) to change stuff up because it simplifies their workflow and they expect someone else to handle all of the communication of their project without even giving me the courtesy of doing such research, I cannot deny I approach such proposals negatively as I feel a bit used and I think that the expectation is "I want this, make it happen", which is not my job. Similarly, I find myself encountering persons who expect that I and the rest of the company will magically intuit the importance of very niche projects without being willing to take the time to simply explain the pain point they wish to address. I'm not even talking about deep technical details here, but simple things like: "We spend N amount of time on task X" "I have an automation workflow that will require Y hours to implement, but N is reduced by Z [time value]" Instead, the presentation is "I want to implement this automation workflow; what do you mean explain the value? Can't you see it? Why are we so caught up in corporate bureaucracy?" I'm all for reducing N as much as possible, but if I myself can't explain why spending Y is vastly cheaper than N, I have no confidence in my ability to convince others that the cost of Y is worth it. I've truly been on both sides, and it is some work to justify a change, sure. Formal proposal documents are a bit much for my taste, but whether we like it or not, C-Levels aren't going to read your code and they definitely aren't going to read a 2000+ word stream-of-consciousness email describing the project in an unstructured way (much less any git readme.md files). The impetus is on the person proposing the change to at least make an effort to convey the reason for the change to the relevant stakeholders.
- CoastalCoder 5y agoI don't that the list insinuates that the listed concerns are usually specious. It seems like an underhanded way to stifle technical debate.
- warent 5y agoI think the whole thing is tongue in cheek. You used to program in Pascal, didn't you?
- justinlloyd 5y agoAnd we're an all-FORTH shop so it'll never scale beyond the undergrad project I got a D in.
- testudovictoria 5y agoThe archived page is pulled from http://www.skirsch.com/humor/techarg.htm http://www.skirsch.com/humor/techarg.htm. There's some merit to some of these, but it's not a serious list.
- tickthokk 5y ago> We need this to fit on a single floppy. Giving this a go on my next argument XD
- klyrs 5y agoFood for thought... if more websites fit on floppies, they'd be practically 3g-friendly.
- ydnaclementine 5y ago> Look, would you just get off your Be obsession for FIVE MINUTES and talk serious design with us? I get the rest of the references, but what is a Be obsession? Also the last one is gold
- mgbelisle 5y agoBe OS is the reference I believe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS
- loudmax 5y agoThat would be BeOS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS Put out of business by everyone's favorite monopolist, but to some extent it lives on as Haiku: https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/
- diskzero 5y agoIt also lives on in the work of BeOS engineers who infiltrated Apple: Tracker -> Finder, BeFS -> Matador, Spotlight, MediaKit -> Final Cut Pro, various media libraries and more. Possibly a lot of the C++ work we did at Apple after leaving Be has been purged, but some still lives!!!
- chipotle_coyote 5y agoI'm pretty sure I saw some DNA from Gobe Productive, the Be answer to AppleWorks, lurking in iWorks. (Which is kind of recursive, since Gobe was created by most of the original AppleWorks team after ClarisWorks' demise, IIRC, who were then hired by Apple after Gobe's demise...) > BeFS -> Matador Was Matador a code name for APFS, or is this something else entirely?
- diskzero 5y agoMatador became Spotlight, but lives on in processes that take over your CPU when you least want them to; mdworker, mds, etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- xscott 5y ago1) I think I was wrong. 2) Thank you.
- moffkalast 5y agoIf you make this change, I will fork the code.
- TruthWillHurt 5y agoOh my god, all my managers were terrible people.. Oh my god, I'm a terrible person!! :)
- throw_m239339 5y ago> Can you generate some USE CASES that would justify the change? Oh so this is where some people in the Go community got their main argument against generics...
- HideousKojima 5y agohttps://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_enjarify_in_go_and_rust/dcsgk7n/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_... >It doesn't. That's just a "template" file, which I use search and replace in order to generate the three monomorphized go files. >If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.
- ghoul2 5y agoAt an Internet-major co in my country, my VP Engineering told me "We don't run stuff downloaded from the internet around here" - I was proposing to trial a Solr/Lucene based search backend as a replacement for the awful MySQL based hacked-together search they then had. I wanted to ask him if he got his copies of Apache/Mysql/php/Redhat on government stamp paper. Instead, I quit two weeks later.
- walrus01 5y agoMaybe they just installed it from redhat cd-roms or dvd-roms and never updated their systems, and considered it "trustworthy" because it came on physical media from the vendor. Have seen that more than once.
- handrous 5y agoMeanwhile, at the company that creates those disks: downloads images from the Internet, burns them to CD
- walrus01 5y agoexactly!
- handrous 5y agoMaybe the brilliant 5D chess move here would have been to download what was needed, then put it on a disc with a printed label. 6D Chess: set up an LLC to do this, and convince the place to buy the discs at significant markup.
- walrus01 5y agoOn a more serious note, when the VP of engineering or CTO or somebody similar takes such a dreadfully ignorant approach, it's a very good indicator that something is more fundamentally wrong and to jump ship. Such a person should be at least capable of understanding the modern concept of how something like a .deb file is authenticated based on its hash from the public gpg keys for the debian package server in question, or the equivalent thereof for redhat/centos.
- kinduff 5y agoThat last one made be lol'd. How do you even respond to that?
- oever 5y agoYes, it only has minor issues.
- nescioquid 5y ago"I'm an iOS user" might be a good try.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoI guess #64 is best followed by an odd handshake.
- yasserf 5y agoA guy being interviewed as a CTO was trying to argue an entire rewrite was needed to move from Postgres to MongoDB (for tabular data). His argument was, and I quote: ‘I’m right, and I don’t need to explain myself to you.’. That was to the non technical cofounder. To myself he just said, ‘I don’t mean any disrespect, but you don’t know how to scale ’. This was literally for a basic crud application with 0.1% usage on a RDS micro instance. I would have loved to hear any technical excuse
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago> I’m right, and I don’t need to explain myself to you. Having "I'm an asshole" tattooed on his forehead would have been less noticeable. We should all be so lucky that interviewees give such clear cut signals.
- raffraffraff 5y agoAn asshole and a bullshitter. So, a bull's asshole.
- d23 5y ago> I thought that whole idea was discredited years ago. I cackled pretty hard at this one.
- handrous 5y agoThat one's evergreen, in Web Dev. Whatever pattern's current now was a laughable newb mistake that'd get you branded too dumb to do web dev, a few years ago. In another couple years, it'll be "common knowledge" that the current thing was always terrible, and the new thing, which is now considered extremely dumb and nothing a pro would ever do, will be in vogue.
- shadowofneptune 5y agoFor instance, going from misusing XML as a domain-specific language to misusing YAML as a domain-specific language while patting yourself on the back about how you got to move away from nasty XML.
- joshuaellinger 5y agoMy favorite is "Now, that's not a stupid idea". I used to do that with a friend at my first job. We'd argue for hours until we found a good solution. The joke, of course, is that everything before then was stupid. Of course, this assumes goodwill and friendship between the arguing parties. There is nothing wrong with losing an argument when a better solution exists.
- gtirloni 5y ago> I like your idea. Why don't you write up a white paper and we'll review it at the next staff meeting I once fell in this trap. Almost two months researching competitors to a solution I had proposed because a coworker proposed something else. At the meeting to present both solutions he was fiddling on his phone and when asked his thoughts after my presentation, just replied "yeah, it's fine".
- dredmorbius 5y agoWell, it worked. Key is to find minimum required effort.
- gtirloni 5y agoIt was a pretty high impact high risk architectural decision. Apparently only I took it seriously enough and the other guy made a fuss about it initially but didn't even care about the outcome. Unfortunately, management became very unsure of everything and thus the wasted time proving my solution would be acceptable. Anyway, I learned a lot so it's all good.
- nine_zeros 5y agoI have been through this. Learn from my experience. If someone else has an alternative proposal, ask THEM to write it down for you to consider. No one is allowed to propose something without first proving that they did the homework or that there is a need to even consider what they are thinking.
- tester756 5y ago* It'll be more performant
- adwn 5y agoI don't get it. Some items on that list can be legitimate, non-technical objections, like 3, 5, 7, 30, 31, 33, 56, 58. Others can be legitimate, technical objections, like 1, 6, 19, 46.
- csours 5y agoAnything can be a legitimate objection. At some point you have to just try something.
- adwn 5y agoThat's terrible advice if the objection is of legal nature, for example, or when human safety is at stake. Also, you typically don't have unlimited resources, so "you just have to try something" isn't a good justification if there valid objections against its feasibility.
- marcosdumay 5y agoAll of them can be legitimate. It's just that they almost never are.
- dang 5y agoSome past threads: Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument [2001] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7982845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7982845 - July 2014 (2 comments) Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440999 - June 2010 (21 comments)
- vonnik 5y agoUpdate for 2021: But is it multi-cloud?
- nineplay 5y ago"You are just trying to pad your resume with latest <cool tech>"
- juangacovas 5y agoAnd then sometimes you see them fly away to another job after not much time
- ZoomZoomZoom 5y agoIs Pascal really considered a second-class language in the industry so using it in the past is some disreputable act? I notice some level of condescension to the language itself from time to time, but surely it's a valid experience, or am I wrong? Hope it's just some thing from the 2001.
- Tozen 5y agoThe "hate" for Pascal (or at least weirdness towards it) was arguably generated by AT&T, and to a lesser extent by Microsoft. The Pascal programming language (to include Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and the IDE from Borland) were in the way and in competition to the languages that AT&T (C and C++) and Microsoft (BASIC and later C#) were attempting to push on the masses. Thus it became a thing to bash it. A lot of this was done by "hit pieces" written about Pascal and then often unthinkingly regurgitated in the media, books, and various blogs. Probably the most well known, that many programmers would know off the top of their heads, is "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", written in 1981 by Brian Kernighan. There were many more similar short "hit jobs" written like it. What is overlooked by many people is that Brian Kernighan worked for AT&T/Bell Labs (and didn't retire until around 2000). He was an advocate for C and friends of Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, co-creators of the C language. Sorry to digress a bit, but Ken Thompson would later on co-create Golang (Go), which many argue shows a strong Pascal influence. Brian Kernighan's assessment of Pascal was very bias, and should have been taken as such. Instead, it was "weaponized" as a way to disparage and discourage use of Pascal, even 20 to 40 years later. Even though: 1) Many of the negatives stated in his papers became no longer true as Pascal evolved as a programming language (to include Object Pascal/Delphi descendants). 2) What he stated were negatives were not true for various versions of Pascal around even the time of his paper being published. 3) Some of the things he described as "negatives" at the time, turned out to actually be positives about the language. Probably a good idea to take a look at the below link to get a better idea of various points: https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Favorite_Programming_Language https://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Why_Pascal_is_Not_My_Fav... Microsoft was the other major player involved, because it could be described that it went to war with Borland (including using dirty tactics), in order to squash it. Particularly Turbo Pascal, various products of Borland, and trying to derail the company. This includes hiring away Borland's top engineers to work for Microsoft, and among their biggest pilfered treasures was Anders Hejlsberg (the creator of C# and Turbo Pascal). Even today, in various C family language circles, there is unfounded and unthinking dislike for Pascal/Object Pascal/Delphi or anything not using curly braces. Despite that the language is a very good and viable alternative to C, C++, Java, or C#.
- sitkack 5y agoI like, "I see your point, you are right"
- diskzero 5y agoI don't have time for this extropian nonsense. Help! Can someone explain this one to me, just so I can use it with some context.
- layer8 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extropianism
- willismichael 5y agoIsn't this the joke? Almost nobody knows what extropian means, but when you're arguing with a blowhard they won't want to admit it and look stupid in front of other people.
- I_complete_me 5y agoA former boss of mine used to use the word "intermercunian" as in : "I went to a meeting and this fellow said X, Y and Z" which, in fairness, was pretty intermercuinan of him." Naturally, I nodded in knowing agreement...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 5y ago+1 as a checklist. There's a good number of points on this list that if true when said are good actual considerations. Maybe not enough to change the outcome but worthwhile nonetheless.
- anon776 5y ago#71: This appears to be brittle
- skrebbel 5y agoI like "We need this to fit on a single floppy" and I use it all the time
- moffkalast 5y agoThat won't scale.
- ww520 5y agoAn AI/ML bot can slurp these up and be a competently sounding CTO.
- bshimmin 5y ago> Yes, I believe that's the approach Windows NT is taking. I really like this one - would anyone care to make a suggestion for a modern replacement for Windows NT here? Perl 6, perhaps?