4 ms·

It is interesting how much weight the author puts on bypassing process and bureaucracy to the success of the project.

weatherlight 5y ago
He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  > that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Most people? (Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in general).
    - seba_dos1 5y ago
      I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense to you. To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people interact with other people. Social rules? Those that "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?... Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid, but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal consequences - it's about the principle. But total abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help people break that law should there be a need for it. Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society, sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and sometimes the other way around. To be honest, I have no idea where the line between "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist" actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I guess. When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without telling me why. I think they were interpreting my questions as undermining their authority, which ironically made them less likely to actually answer me, but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to work in a field where I generally don't have to do things that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents were warning me about back then ;)). Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority personality trait".
      - BurningPenguin 5y ago
        Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.
  - weatherlight 5y ago
    I find people will go with the flow and basically follow orders. Most people won't shake the boat.
- Lammy 5y ago
  > It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit of course https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-between-cattle-temperament-and-autism/ https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-bet...
microtherion 5y ago
Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work. Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.
olliej 5y ago
I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor" bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable response. Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they will have many restrictions on any changes going in, including feature work from their own team, let alone some random potentially behavior changing ones. Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even if making tests is hard. There have been a few times where I have spent longer (sometimes way longer) building the infrastructure to make a test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the time there's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently important that they might want to bypass such.
xtat 5y ago
The view from here is that doing anything at big SV tech is way more politics than tech.

He admits else where on Quora to having Aspergers. It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. It's possible in the past, he was burned by the bureaucracy at Apple.

marcellus23 5y ago
> that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. This seems like neurotypical behavior to me. I'm not sure who wouldn't be resistant to authority in a situation like that.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Most people? (Though I'd say it's not about Aspergers or not, it's more like an anti-authority personality trait or not, in general).
  - seba_dos1 5y ago
    I'm not sure it's about anti-authority. You can accept authorities, refer to them and trust them when you lack own knowledge, even legalistically follow them, yet have a strong resistance reaction once you decide that what the authority does is hurtful and/or doesn't make sense to you. To me, this seems very connected to how autistic people interact with other people. Social rules? Those that "make sense" to me have to be followed, or I'll be lost and uncomfortable. Those that don't? Fuck them. Now, it would sure be easier if everyone agreed on what "makes sense" and what doesn't, wouldn't it?... Codes? Laws? I'll gladly follow them, usually. Speed limits make sense to me, so I won't be speeding even if nobody sees it. Mask wearing? The same. I can even be legalistic about minor issues ("well, it's kinda stupid, but that's the law so I'll follow it and maybe lobby for changing it"), and it's not just about potential legal consequences - it's about the principle. But total abortion ban? It's stupid, morally wrong and hurtful at its core, so it doesn't exist to me and I'm going to help people break that law should there be a need for it. Copyrights? Sometimes make sense and help society, sometimes don't and hurt it - so I sometimes fully respect them and consider breaking them wrong, and sometimes the other way around. To be honest, I have no idea where the line between "minor issue, comply" and "doesn't make sense, resist" actually lies. Not even an intuition. Food for thought, I guess. When I was young, countless of stupid arguments with my parents could be avoided if they didn't insist on making me do something that seemed unnecessary to me without telling me why. I think they were interpreting my questions as undermining their authority, which ironically made them less likely to actually answer me, but it's not that I didn't want to listen to them - I would be glad to comply immediately if only I knew that it makes sense. If I don't feel like it does, I'll have a hard time doing it (even if my conscious self actually decides to comply). If I weren't so lucky to be able to work in a field where I generally don't have to do things that don't make sense to me, I'm pretty sure I'd have been fired from several jobs by now (just like my parents were warning me about back then ;)). Most people don't seem to think this way at all, and I don't think that it can be described as "anti-authority personality trait".
    - BurningPenguin 5y ago
      Maybe unrelated to the main topic, but damn, this sounds familiar. But i was never diagnosed. There were only mentions about "austistic features". My mom took that as an insult to her parenting skills for some reason.
- weatherlight 5y ago
  I find people will go with the flow and basically follow orders. Most people won't shake the boat.
Lammy 5y ago
> It's been in my experience, and take that with a grain of salt, that those with Aspergers tend to resistant authority when they feel the authority is arbitrary, hurtful or incompetent. Also authority: wouldn't it be great if we could identify this """disorder""" early and eliminate it?? for your benefit of course https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-between-cattle-temperament-and-autism/ https://www.thecattlesite.com/articles/4525/genetic-link-bet...

microtherion 5y ago

Under regular circumstances, you can't just walk in and change another team's header files, nor force them to make a particular change you want to make happen, so normally, it would be very difficult to make changes affecting so many different projects.

astrange 5y ago
It's also true that projects with strict rules about what each individual commit fixes can make it hard to fix a bunch of highly related bugs at once. Patch-based OSS projects can be like this too.
jeffbee 5y ago
Is that an Apple thing? Because I've definitely worked on large-scale commercial projects where changes to everyone's includes were routine.
- microtherion 5y ago
  What I described is an Apple thing. I would not know practices at other companies. I'm sure there are other ways of organizing work. Then again, an OS and its associated apps are very large scale indeed, and have grown by necessity over a very long period of time, by a very heterogeneous team. Not sure if your large scale projects had similar concerns.

olliej 5y ago

I think it depends on a whole matter of things - like the bug priorities: If someone is not aware of the context of a "minor" bug they may lower the priority, that would be a reasonable response. Alternatively if there's a team running up on a release they will have many restrictions on any changes going in, including feature work from their own team, let alone some random potentially behavior changing ones. Many of the processes exist because time has told us bad things happen if they don't: even small projects now generally require a review for minor patches at this point, or require tests even if making tests is hard. There have been a few times where I have spent longer (sometimes way longer) building the infrastructure to make a test and the test, for a change that took less than a day. In the long run that infrastructure was super useful, but at the time there's a lot of "uuggghh, whyyy". In this particular case it seems that day-to-day slip was considered sufficiently important that they might want to bypass such.

xtat 5y ago

The view from here is that doing anything at big SV tech is way more politics than tech.