13 ms·

Be critical or be corrupted

297 points by kiyanwang 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago
I was looking for a solution to the problem posed but found none.
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  It's an analysis and I find the comparison with The Wire quite interesting. There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be proposed with every analysis of a complex problem.
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
    "There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be proposed with every analysis of a complex problem." Exactly. I much prefer a good analysis without a proposed solution.
- cjcenizal 4y ago
  Hi, author here! I wish I had a solution to this problem! The idealistic side of me wants everyone to "think critically". Of course if all humans were critical about the decisions they made and their effects on the systems around them (organizations, society, environment), we probably wouldn't have wars and global warming. So that won't scale beyond the individual, which might be acceptable from a Stoic perspective but I doubt that's the solution you're looking for. Oren Ellenborgen shared my post in today's edition of Software Lead Weekly [1], and in his summary of the post he suggests using Key Failure Indicators (KFIs) to counterbalance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). From what I understand, the idea is that you observe metrics of success but you also observe metrics of health, and take action if the former starts degrading the latter. For example, if you want to deliver features more quickly, you might measure the time between a change is submitted for review and the time it's deployed. But if you're concerned that this could degrade quality, you could also measure the number of defects that are identified. If defects increase as delivery time decreases, this indicates the success metric is causing some undesirable behavior. Hope this helps. [1] https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513 https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    You might care to listen to David Simon's own take on statistics and measurement: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>
- inquist 4y ago
  Strive to clarify fundamental goals. Consider possible second-order effects of policy decisions. Reevaluate intermediate goals after observing their effects.
- kashkhan 4y ago
  The system of employment is the problem. Drug dealers and police are employees and they cannot win. While the system has power employees have none. Mike, Bubbles, Bunny, Omar, Hauk, etc are not employees or get out and they win or at least get out to live their own lives as they want. Independent Entrepreneurship is the only way out. It may not work, but you have a chance,
  - lupire 4y ago
    Bubbles is a desperate addict. Omar is dead before 40 and was hiding his sexuality. These are not successful lives.
    - kashkhan 4y ago
      Everyone dies. Better to live free and die young then have a long life as a slave.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        All addicts are slaves. Don't glorify it.
        kashkhan 4y ago
        better an addict than a slave to another man.
        MichaelCollins 4y ago
        I assure you, it is better to be a housed and healthy 'wage slave' than a homeless heroin addict.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    There are many valid interpretations of The Wire's themes, but I dare to suggest that "hustle grindset" is not one of them.
woodruffw 4y ago
This is a good summary of a specific motif in The Wire, but I think it misses the larger message of the show: that there is no institutional or even individual difference between the two recurring groups in the show (Baltimore's police and drug dealers). In the show, both groups of individuals are subject to their institutions: power figures come and go (and bring changes that superficially alter the state of affairs), but the game fundamentally remains the same. This repeats itself in every explored institution: industry, schools, news, &c. In other words: there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it around. The show's few "good" characters are characterized primarily by the ways in which their personal corruption does or does not affect the corruption of the larger institution they belong to (Daniels' FBI investigation, for example, or Kima's personal descent.)
- d23 4y ago
  Man, I need to give the wire another shot.
  - jwlake 4y ago
    The first season is slow but it really picks up.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      I don’t see how anyone could watch the opening scene of The Wire and not be compelled to watch the rest of it.
      - lupire 4y ago
        The show is extremely dangerous to mental health, if you care about living in a good world and can't handle the impossibility of it.
        jeffbee 4y ago
        Simon's previous TV show, and his book, revolved around the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. I feel like that was already enough to squash hopes of living in a good world.
noasaservice 4y ago
I work in system engineering/architecture. My job is some of hardest to even tell if we work. I've been back and forth with multiple managers and C levels that any metric chosen can and will be gamed. But they again and again want some quality assessment to use. For a while, they used tickets closed. So we all started submitting BS tickets to do tasks like "send email". You all can imagine the inanity of that. From my experiences there is no good way to track... Well, perhaps having a grab bag of conflicting performance metrics, and then choosing one at random? (But again, even that can be gamed)
- wmeredith 4y ago
  "they again and again want some quality assessment to use" It sounds like they want something quantitative not qualitative. They both have their place, and one sort of measure without the other is missing a big part of the picture.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  The solution is to never reveal the metrics used and to rely on many metrics to evaluate. Singular metric evaluation, like the growth model insanity, is how we end up with massive companies making no profit but somehow subsidizing their services to users.
  - deckard1 4y ago
    In my experience metrics aren't used to evaluate. They are used to justify decisions management has already made. Management will never tell you, but they almost certainly have hidden metrics (or, simply, biases). But the discovery of such hidden metrics would destroy the image of the egalitarian work environment they like to promote. Much like in The Wire, you come to a conclusion and then work backwards with the metrics to find your support.
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      Yeah, I can see that. Golden parachute, just gotta get some nice stats on the resume
gbjw 4y ago
“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” - William Blake
- digdugdirk 4y ago
  Just wanted to comment to share how much I was struck by this quote. And as a bonus, William Blake himself seems like a delightful research rabbit hole to fall down later today.
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    Here you go, friend: http://blakearchive.org/ http://blakearchive.org/ Note that the search identifies both text and images within the illuminated texts.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Corruption is within all power structures without exception... It is often not a character trait as many wrongly assume. In general, compartmentalizing a few clear limited-scope areas for each team member is an effective management task. In this manner, there is direct accountability when something goes wrong, and a user-base focuses attention on a flaw... a growing number of regression tests helps some do their job properly... rather than sidetrack the rest of the team. This can be brutal to laggards getting hazed, but a blessing to senior staff now avoiding spending half the day reverting garbage. ;)
draw_down 4y ago
RajT88 4y ago
> The department measures crime in terms of felonies, so they show a reduction in crime by reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors, thus letting violent criminals off the hook. This threw me for a loop. I asked a contact on the PD of a neighboring town some years back how Naperville, IL is consistently the lowest general crime rate and "Safest Town in America", and this was the answer. Having lived there and heard the stories about police interactions with victims, I believe it.
maerF0x0 4y ago
> People fixate on the numbers I've had an unsettled feeling for some time that managers, perhaps many execs, are mostly liabilities... Far to often I have seen someone categorize _something_ as not a _something else_ to ensure it doesn't raise any suspicions of their superiors, manipulates the metrics etc. It's lead me to wonder if investment/effort is better invested to cultivate ethos more than measurement. Ethos like "We do what's best for the customer" or "We fix errors when we see them" instead of "Did we hit the SLO?"[1] or "How many open bugs are in the system"[2] Anyone else felt this, or am I just the burnt out, toxic, outlier? [1]: people start to categorize things as not downtime [2]: People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as "too many!"
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
  Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- pklausler 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- cjcenizal 4y ago
  > People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as "too many!" I know what you mean. I've seen teams treat a backlog's growth as being a root problem. They responded by closing issues with the explanation "We probably won't ever get around to this" or by creating scripts that will auto-close any issue after a set period of time. I'm still on the fence about whether this is productive or not. I guess it depends on the team's context. A growing backlog indicates strong demand for features and/or many defects being found in the product, at a rate which outpaces the team's ability to respond. My instinct is to make changes to any part of that system but the backlog itself, since it is real data with real value. My strong opinion weakly held is if you manipulate this data, you're just putting blinders on.
  - throwawaysleep 4y ago
    One of my teams is going through this currently. Our Scrum Master keeps on wanting to erase our backlog as she thinks it makes us look bad to management.
mdip 4y ago
OH how I can relate to the sentiment expressed in "Rise of the Rotation". On the surface it sounds perfectly reasonable. As the author explains, it's falls apart quickly. There's still going to be people that will make the argument that, given the author's specific example, that "it gives everyone a more complete understanding of the product to work that way". It's wrong (I'll elaborate if required). But I can hear it. This affected me in a way, though, that is even more unreasonable -- "The Wire" rotation example, it'd be like ... I don't know ... having the person who designed the guns the department uses participate in the "murder investigation rotation". Due to a company acquisition, I found myself kludged into an Architecture Engineering team ... I was/am a developer. This happened because Infrastructure[0] didn't want to lose their developer (me[1]) and my role at this place over 17 years had expanded to the point that I fit on any team and no team. I gathered I was put in Arch due to my elevated title (and a misplaced concern of insulting me) and because that specific team because it had "unix guys"[2], they often know how to write shell scripts, which are kind of ... oh, and this other guy is a developer in Ops, too -- completely different language/framework/tech -- but ... it quacks like a duck? They had a two-week on-call rotation between 5 (now 7) men. I managed to hold off being worked into it for half a year using the same argument: "I support write software in .NET for Windows, your legacy team supports software on Unix/Linux. I expect to be woke up at 3:00 AM if anything of mine fails, all the time and nobody on your team is qualified to log into the box let alone troubleshoot it ... and vice versa". The first few days of my first on-call rotation consisted of being woken up at 2:00 AM for some server-or-another, me finding someone capable of resolving it, then finding their off-hours contact info, and about 20 minutes later apologizing to them, repeating what I was just told and going back to sleep. My toddler (at the time) could have done that part of my job. I repeated my difficulties in "actually being useful on-call" to my manager during that week at our 1:1 (to which I was brushed off, again), but included my difficulties in "finding people to call" ... he must have thought he found an easy win, there, because he nearly cut me off half-way through with a "Just call my cell if you run into trouble with that." So my new on-call work flow became: (1) Wake up at 2:00 AM to a ringing phone, (2) Write down the ticket number, (3) wake up my boss to find out who to call, (4) thank him, finishing the call off with "He's more likely to answer if you call, would you mind relaying the ticket number to him for me?" It reduced my TTRTB (Time-to-return-to-bed) from 10-15 minutes to far less than 5. That insanity was the biggest factor in why I left but not because of the apologizing/dislike of it all. My boss knew he was operating in a tricky spot. If his boss knew I was even slightly unhappy with being on-call, I'd be taken out and he'd have taken grief. His options were (a) explain to the rest of the team that "this guy and this other guy don't do anything resembling your work so rather than add them as one more delay to waking you up (or worse, breaking something), they're going to manage on-call for their own apps amongst themselves and not be part of our on-call" or (b) continue to accept calls from me at 2:00 AM reminding him of how dumb it was to put me on call. He chose the latter. And as I evaluated their (much larger than the company I had come from in the merger) IT operation, I saw a pattern of "because that's how we have always done it" and similarly ridiculous -- astronomically expensive at times -- operational choices. That culture was pervasive throughout IT because the merged company had far more people (2:1?) that made up the new organization because -- despite the companies having similar IT services/quality -- we operated better ... with far fewer people. [0] We basically had Infrastructure/Architecture and Development. Technically Infra/Arch were two distinct VPs reporting to whatever the title was of the interim person considered "the C-Level over IT" during those months of the integration. [1] And I wanted nothing to do with "Enterprise Development" at this place. [2] I wrote nothing that ran directly on Linux/Unix at that time.
photochemsyn 4y ago
It's funny how corruption gets defined and re-defined by so many competing interests. Milton Friedman, for example, famously said that 'Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation.' This mentality, when applied to the food / medicine / drug trade, has some curious results. On one hand, it suggests we eliminate all criminal penalties for buying, selling and consuming all drugs, while on the other the normal criminal penalties for theft of drugs would apply. Note also that sellers could adulterate their product (no regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit as long as it maximized their market efficiency (profit margins, basically), based on the belief that customers could shift to other producers if they didn't like the product. The real result of criminalization of drugs, rather than regulation of drugs, is that a black market develops, characterized by violent conflicts between sellers over access to that market, control of production and supply, etc. This is why decriminalization makes a lot of sense, coupled with things like public health campaigns aimed at reducing usage, bans on advertising drugs and marketing drugs to children, etc.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  My main problem with Milton Friedman's philosophy is the assumption that people actively investigate every product they consume. For example, if something says baby formula on the tin, most reasonable people will believe that it is baby formula, and not something terrible like drywall dust. If the parent investigates the company and realizes that the company is fraudulent, of course they will switch to a company that is safer for their child. But will they do the same for every other product they take into their home? Of course not! There isn't enough time in the day for that. Even if its just a little bit, some government oversite has to happen to protect the rights of consumers. Not to the point where it keeps the free market from innovating, but enough to make sure people aren't eating literal plastic and putting radium in makeup.
  - ip26 4y ago
    Even most libertarians support strong contract enforcement, because it lubricates the free market. You can have a free market without, but binding contracts make it work much more efficiently. Truth in labeling & advertising should be grouped into that same category, in my opinion. It makes the market work better by reducing friction.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Change the world before the world changes you.
musingsole 4y ago
> We just have to consider every decision's second-order effects. I read that as "we just have to stop behaving in the characteristic way we're predetermined to forever behave in" The "corruption" related to rotations arises from the obvious failings of the system and a need to both work around it enough to get by and cope with it enough to not go insane. So long as the incentives remain perverted, so will the behavior.
- cjcenizal 4y ago
  Ah, thanks for pointing out that ambiguity! The point I intended to make was that people make decisions that lead to rotations and other systems. And those people need to consider their decisions' second-order effects.
lamontcg 4y ago
> Want to know what/how/why things are broken in your organization? Ask people! When senior engineers tell you they can't do anything without more headcount, maybe consider believing them.
brundolf 4y ago
My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire Please do. It took me a few months to get through it, but it’s worth it. The show broke many of the old conventions that were expected in a television series and paved the way for much of what we see today.
throwawaysleep 4y ago
I’ve personally learned in life to focus on excelling at being corrupt.
Haleyborough 4y ago
[dead]
formerkrogemp 4y ago
Believe in the false dilemma or else?
deathanatos 4y ago
One of the … things … that the article gets towards is that there is "make customer's problem disappear" and "fix the root cause/bug". And so many companies fail to make the distinction. E.g., Azure: there's customer support, but they only do the "make customer's problem (or really, the ticket) disappear" side of it. Woe be unto you should your problem be caused by a bug in Azure: they have no means of dealing with that. Eventually the ticket dies — usually because my patience has limits — and I am sure they count that as a "win". Ticket closed, after all … even if my problem is no longer a problem b/c I've just abandoned ship. And the amount of software/stuff out there with no means to report bugs/defects is rather astounding.
civilized 4y ago
Okay article, but lacking depth, especially in the recommendations of what we can do. > We can carefully design our metrics and think critically about the behaviors we expect them to incentivize In The Wire, the metrics are carefully designed. Homicide clearance rate is a great, practical metric. Everyone is thinking, very critically, about the behaviors they expect the metrics to incentivize. > We can extend self-awareness and critical thinking to all decisions made within an organization. In The Wire, everyone is very self-aware and thinking very critically about the decisions made within the organization. > We can look beyond metrics by qualifying success and failure. In The Wire, everyone is looking beyond the metrics. The problem with the BPD in The Wire isn't a lack self-awareness and critical thinking. It's that so many people are using their self-awareness and critical thinking to maximize their self-interest rather than the mission of the organization.
- hitekker 4y ago
  You're being downvoted for pointing out the make-believe that we want to believe in. Like you said, the recommendations are fantasy. The author is unwilling to delve into the darkness within the game, so his solution is essentially "bring in smarter people like myself". "Be critical or be corrupted" is a platitude that doesn't mean much other than "think harder". Ironically, it's the kind of phrase that lends itself well to corruption: it sounds good, feels good, but isn't defined, easy to abuse, and so eventually becomes another card in the game.
dirtyid 4y ago
IMO Yuen Yuen Ang's unbundled corruption index is useful model for evaluating different types of corruption, all are "bad" but not equally so. TLDR in this 2x2 matrix: https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/57/files/2021/02/Typology-of-corruption.jpg https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/57/files/2021/02/Typo... And how countries stack up: https://i0.wp.com/oecd-development-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fig-2-uci-all.png?resize=720%2C932&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/oecd-development-matters.org/wp-content/up... Article: https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-corruption-why-it-matters-and-how-to-do-it/ https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-c...
dredmorbius 4y ago
For excellent insights into the use, misuse, and gaming of statistics, from the source, I'd strongly recommend David Simon's lecture "The Audacity of Despair", presented at UC Berkeley on 10 December 2008. It's long at 70 minutes, but quite solid. I'd seen this several years before watching the series, and it was this lecture specifically which sold it to me. <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw> The bit on statistics starts at about 8m20s. Nutshell: If you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics.... I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it. I was that cynical about it. As I got better as a reporter I realised that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring how things are going in terms of quality, someone will run behind them within the institution to destroy that statistic as a meaningful measurement of anything. There's exposition around this both ahead and after, and again, there's a ton of meat in this talk.
nathias 4y ago
the game's the game
everdrive 4y ago
The wire is open to a wide range of interpretations because it was so realistic. I believe the director is famous for saying that both liberals and conservatives have commented that the Wire shows how things "really are." Presumably, it's realistic enough that people can read their own narratives into it, just as we do in real life.
frozencell 4y ago
Russia is corrupted, US is corrupted, EU is corrupted, the rest who don't comment is corrupted... Power is in individuals.
- frozencell 4y ago
- frozencell 4y ago
  Downvoters have time to downvote but not to care about the little desperate people they are downvoting.
WalterBright 4y ago
The Wire is a great story. Star Trek is a great story. RomComs can be very entertaining. But taking life lessons from fiction is a serious mistake. I made those mistakes many times. They're fantasies dreamed up by writers, and being fantasies, those imaginary worlds work in the way the writer thinks things ought to work. The real world doesn't work that way. Real interactions among people, if they have any relationship to movie plots, is simply accidental. This is a large reason why I have slowly gravitated over the years towards reading history books rather than fiction. History is real, and it doesn't work like fiction (a beginning, a middle, an end). The life lessons in them actually work. For just one example, Star Trek is the fantasy of the benevolent dictator, embodied by Kirk, and his idiot savant advisor, Spock. I love ST as much as anyone, but the benevolent dictator is a pure fantasy.
- oska 4y ago
  I agree with your point about history being a great instructor but the fiction examples you gave were pop fiction, that are deliberate fantasy (and thus disastrous to think they can teach you life lessons, a point that has been repeatedly made from at least as early as Don Quixote). How about Shakespeare though?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Literary fiction isn't any different. Why should it be? (Shakespeare in its day was pop fiction for the masses.) The examples I cited may be deliberate fantasy, but people still regard them as life lessons. For The Wire, Hahvahd even had a course of instruction on drug crime using The Wire to teach. I was amazed that people defended this.
    - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
      The wire was written by people who worked as actual police. The stories in the wire obviously aren't true, but when I found that out it made complete sense. There's just something more real about the wire than most other shows.
l0b0 4y ago
As a senior, I consider "keeping us honest" one of my primary tasks: - It's not done until at least it's in front of the customer. - Estimates are useful, but not for any of the obvious reasons.[1] - Understand lints before silencing them. - If it's important enough to get a name, spend the time to give it a good name. [1] https://mdalmijn.com/11-laws-of-software-estimation-for-complex-work/ https://mdalmijn.com/11-laws-of-software-estimation-for-comp...
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
An entire blog post about the wire discussing "juking the stats".... And it doesn't mention "juking the stats"?

297 points by kiyanwang 4y ago

bergenty 4y ago

I was looking for a solution to the problem posed but found none.

pastacacioepepe 4y ago
It's an analysis and I find the comparison with The Wire quite interesting. There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be proposed with every analysis of a complex problem.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  "There is no rule or law requiring a solution to be proposed with every analysis of a complex problem." Exactly. I much prefer a good analysis without a proposed solution.
cjcenizal 4y ago
Hi, author here! I wish I had a solution to this problem! The idealistic side of me wants everyone to "think critically". Of course if all humans were critical about the decisions they made and their effects on the systems around them (organizations, society, environment), we probably wouldn't have wars and global warming. So that won't scale beyond the individual, which might be acceptable from a Stoic perspective but I doubt that's the solution you're looking for. Oren Ellenborgen shared my post in today's edition of Software Lead Weekly [1], and in his summary of the post he suggests using Key Failure Indicators (KFIs) to counterbalance Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). From what I understand, the idea is that you observe metrics of success but you also observe metrics of health, and take action if the former starts degrading the latter. For example, if you want to deliver features more quickly, you might measure the time between a change is submitted for review and the time it's deployed. But if you're concerned that this could degrade quality, you could also measure the number of defects that are identified. If defects increase as delivery time decreases, this indicates the success metric is causing some undesirable behavior. Hope this helps. [1] https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513 https://softwareleadweekly.com/issues/513
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  You might care to listen to David Simon's own take on statistics and measurement: <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>
inquist 4y ago
Strive to clarify fundamental goals. Consider possible second-order effects of policy decisions. Reevaluate intermediate goals after observing their effects.
kashkhan 4y ago
The system of employment is the problem. Drug dealers and police are employees and they cannot win. While the system has power employees have none. Mike, Bubbles, Bunny, Omar, Hauk, etc are not employees or get out and they win or at least get out to live their own lives as they want. Independent Entrepreneurship is the only way out. It may not work, but you have a chance,
- lupire 4y ago
  Bubbles is a desperate addict. Omar is dead before 40 and was hiding his sexuality. These are not successful lives.
  - kashkhan 4y ago
    Everyone dies. Better to live free and die young then have a long life as a slave.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      All addicts are slaves. Don't glorify it.
      - kashkhan 4y ago
        better an addict than a slave to another man.
        MichaelCollins 4y ago
        I assure you, it is better to be a housed and healthy 'wage slave' than a homeless heroin addict.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  There are many valid interpretations of The Wire's themes, but I dare to suggest that "hustle grindset" is not one of them.

woodruffw 4y ago

This is a good summary of a specific motif in The Wire, but I think it misses the larger message of the show: that there is no institutional or even individual difference between the two recurring groups in the show (Baltimore's police and drug dealers). In the show, both groups of individuals are subject to their institutions: power figures come and go (and bring changes that superficially alter the state of affairs), but the game fundamentally remains the same. This repeats itself in every explored institution: industry, schools, news, &c. In other words: there is no avoiding "corruption," only moving it around. The show's few "good" characters are characterized primarily by the ways in which their personal corruption does or does not affect the corruption of the larger institution they belong to (Daniels' FBI investigation, for example, or Kima's personal descent.)

d23 4y ago
Man, I need to give the wire another shot.
- jwlake 4y ago
  The first season is slow but it really picks up.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    I don’t see how anyone could watch the opening scene of The Wire and not be compelled to watch the rest of it.
    - lupire 4y ago
      The show is extremely dangerous to mental health, if you care about living in a good world and can't handle the impossibility of it.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Simon's previous TV show, and his book, revolved around the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. I feel like that was already enough to squash hopes of living in a good world.

noasaservice 4y ago

I work in system engineering/architecture. My job is some of hardest to even tell if we work. I've been back and forth with multiple managers and C levels that any metric chosen can and will be gamed. But they again and again want some quality assessment to use. For a while, they used tickets closed. So we all started submitting BS tickets to do tasks like "send email". You all can imagine the inanity of that. From my experiences there is no good way to track... Well, perhaps having a grab bag of conflicting performance metrics, and then choosing one at random? (But again, even that can be gamed)

wmeredith 4y ago
"they again and again want some quality assessment to use" It sounds like they want something quantitative not qualitative. They both have their place, and one sort of measure without the other is missing a big part of the picture.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
The solution is to never reveal the metrics used and to rely on many metrics to evaluate. Singular metric evaluation, like the growth model insanity, is how we end up with massive companies making no profit but somehow subsidizing their services to users.
- deckard1 4y ago
  In my experience metrics aren't used to evaluate. They are used to justify decisions management has already made. Management will never tell you, but they almost certainly have hidden metrics (or, simply, biases). But the discovery of such hidden metrics would destroy the image of the egalitarian work environment they like to promote. Much like in The Wire, you come to a conclusion and then work backwards with the metrics to find your support.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    Yeah, I can see that. Golden parachute, just gotta get some nice stats on the resume

gbjw 4y ago

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” - William Blake

digdugdirk 4y ago
Just wanted to comment to share how much I was struck by this quote. And as a bonus, William Blake himself seems like a delightful research rabbit hole to fall down later today.
- germinalphrase 4y ago
  Here you go, friend: http://blakearchive.org/ http://blakearchive.org/ Note that the search identifies both text and images within the illuminated texts.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Corruption is within all power structures without exception... It is often not a character trait as many wrongly assume. In general, compartmentalizing a few clear limited-scope areas for each team member is an effective management task. In this manner, there is direct accountability when something goes wrong, and a user-base focuses attention on a flaw... a growing number of regression tests helps some do their job properly... rather than sidetrack the rest of the team. This can be brutal to laggards getting hazed, but a blessing to senior staff now avoiding spending half the day reverting garbage. ;)

draw_down 4y ago

RajT88 4y ago

> The department measures crime in terms of felonies, so they show a reduction in crime by reclassifying felonies as misdemeanors, thus letting violent criminals off the hook. This threw me for a loop. I asked a contact on the PD of a neighboring town some years back how Naperville, IL is consistently the lowest general crime rate and "Safest Town in America", and this was the answer. Having lived there and heard the stories about police interactions with victims, I believe it.

maerF0x0 4y ago

> People fixate on the numbers I've had an unsettled feeling for some time that managers, perhaps many execs, are mostly liabilities... Far to often I have seen someone categorize _something_ as not a _something else_ to ensure it doesn't raise any suspicions of their superiors, manipulates the metrics etc. It's lead me to wonder if investment/effort is better invested to cultivate ethos more than measurement. Ethos like "We do what's best for the customer" or "We fix errors when we see them" instead of "Did we hit the SLO?"[1] or "How many open bugs are in the system"[2] Anyone else felt this, or am I just the burnt out, toxic, outlier? [1]: people start to categorize things as not downtime [2]: People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as "too many!"

rufus_foreman 4y ago
Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
pklausler 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
cjcenizal 4y ago
> People start to chastise those who open JIRA bug tickets as "too many!" I know what you mean. I've seen teams treat a backlog's growth as being a root problem. They responded by closing issues with the explanation "We probably won't ever get around to this" or by creating scripts that will auto-close any issue after a set period of time. I'm still on the fence about whether this is productive or not. I guess it depends on the team's context. A growing backlog indicates strong demand for features and/or many defects being found in the product, at a rate which outpaces the team's ability to respond. My instinct is to make changes to any part of that system but the backlog itself, since it is real data with real value. My strong opinion weakly held is if you manipulate this data, you're just putting blinders on.
- throwawaysleep 4y ago
  One of my teams is going through this currently. Our Scrum Master keeps on wanting to erase our backlog as she thinks it makes us look bad to management.

mdip 4y ago

OH how I can relate to the sentiment expressed in "Rise of the Rotation". On the surface it sounds perfectly reasonable. As the author explains, it's falls apart quickly. There's still going to be people that will make the argument that, given the author's specific example, that "it gives everyone a more complete understanding of the product to work that way". It's wrong (I'll elaborate if required). But I can hear it. This affected me in a way, though, that is even more unreasonable -- "The Wire" rotation example, it'd be like ... I don't know ... having the person who designed the guns the department uses participate in the "murder investigation rotation". Due to a company acquisition, I found myself kludged into an Architecture Engineering team ... I was/am a developer. This happened because Infrastructure[0] didn't want to lose their developer (me[1]) and my role at this place over 17 years had expanded to the point that I fit on any team and no team. I gathered I was put in Arch due to my elevated title (and a misplaced concern of insulting me) and because that specific team because it had "unix guys"[2], they often know how to write shell scripts, which are kind of ... oh, and this other guy is a developer in Ops, too -- completely different language/framework/tech -- but ... it quacks like a duck? They had a two-week on-call rotation between 5 (now 7) men. I managed to hold off being worked into it for half a year using the same argument: "I support write software in .NET for Windows, your legacy team supports software on Unix/Linux. I expect to be woke up at 3:00 AM if anything of mine fails, all the time and nobody on your team is qualified to log into the box let alone troubleshoot it ... and vice versa". The first few days of my first on-call rotation consisted of being woken up at 2:00 AM for some server-or-another, me finding someone capable of resolving it, then finding their off-hours contact info, and about 20 minutes later apologizing to them, repeating what I was just told and going back to sleep. My toddler (at the time) could have done that part of my job. I repeated my difficulties in "actually being useful on-call" to my manager during that week at our 1:1 (to which I was brushed off, again), but included my difficulties in "finding people to call" ... he must have thought he found an easy win, there, because he nearly cut me off half-way through with a "Just call my cell if you run into trouble with that." So my new on-call work flow became: (1) Wake up at 2:00 AM to a ringing phone, (2) Write down the ticket number, (3) wake up my boss to find out who to call, (4) thank him, finishing the call off with "He's more likely to answer if you call, would you mind relaying the ticket number to him for me?" It reduced my TTRTB (Time-to-return-to-bed) from 10-15 minutes to far less than 5. That insanity was the biggest factor in why I left but not because of the apologizing/dislike of it all. My boss knew he was operating in a tricky spot. If his boss knew I was even slightly unhappy with being on-call, I'd be taken out and he'd have taken grief. His options were (a) explain to the rest of the team that "this guy and this other guy don't do anything resembling your work so rather than add them as one more delay to waking you up (or worse, breaking something), they're going to manage on-call for their own apps amongst themselves and not be part of our on-call" or (b) continue to accept calls from me at 2:00 AM reminding him of how dumb it was to put me on call. He chose the latter. And as I evaluated their (much larger than the company I had come from in the merger) IT operation, I saw a pattern of "because that's how we have always done it" and similarly ridiculous -- astronomically expensive at times -- operational choices. That culture was pervasive throughout IT because the merged company had far more people (2:1?) that made up the new organization because -- despite the companies having similar IT services/quality -- we operated better ... with far fewer people. [0] We basically had Infrastructure/Architecture and Development. Technically Infra/Arch were two distinct VPs reporting to whatever the title was of the interim person considered "the C-Level over IT" during those months of the integration. [1] And I wanted nothing to do with "Enterprise Development" at this place. [2] I wrote nothing that ran directly on Linux/Unix at that time.

photochemsyn 4y ago

It's funny how corruption gets defined and re-defined by so many competing interests. Milton Friedman, for example, famously said that 'Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulation.' This mentality, when applied to the food / medicine / drug trade, has some curious results. On one hand, it suggests we eliminate all criminal penalties for buying, selling and consuming all drugs, while on the other the normal criminal penalties for theft of drugs would apply. Note also that sellers could adulterate their product (no regulations, remember?) in any way they saw fit as long as it maximized their market efficiency (profit margins, basically), based on the belief that customers could shift to other producers if they didn't like the product. The real result of criminalization of drugs, rather than regulation of drugs, is that a black market develops, characterized by violent conflicts between sellers over access to that market, control of production and supply, etc. This is why decriminalization makes a lot of sense, coupled with things like public health campaigns aimed at reducing usage, bans on advertising drugs and marketing drugs to children, etc.

danjoredd 4y ago
My main problem with Milton Friedman's philosophy is the assumption that people actively investigate every product they consume. For example, if something says baby formula on the tin, most reasonable people will believe that it is baby formula, and not something terrible like drywall dust. If the parent investigates the company and realizes that the company is fraudulent, of course they will switch to a company that is safer for their child. But will they do the same for every other product they take into their home? Of course not! There isn't enough time in the day for that. Even if its just a little bit, some government oversite has to happen to protect the rights of consumers. Not to the point where it keeps the free market from innovating, but enough to make sure people aren't eating literal plastic and putting radium in makeup.
- ip26 4y ago
  Even most libertarians support strong contract enforcement, because it lubricates the free market. You can have a free market without, but binding contracts make it work much more efficiently. Truth in labeling & advertising should be grouped into that same category, in my opinion. It makes the market work better by reducing friction.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Change the world before the world changes you.

musingsole 4y ago

> We just have to consider every decision's second-order effects. I read that as "we just have to stop behaving in the characteristic way we're predetermined to forever behave in" The "corruption" related to rotations arises from the obvious failings of the system and a need to both work around it enough to get by and cope with it enough to not go insane. So long as the incentives remain perverted, so will the behavior.

cjcenizal 4y ago
Ah, thanks for pointing out that ambiguity! The point I intended to make was that people make decisions that lead to rotations and other systems. And those people need to consider their decisions' second-order effects.

lamontcg 4y ago

> Want to know what/how/why things are broken in your organization? Ask people! When senior engineers tell you they can't do anything without more headcount, maybe consider believing them.

brundolf 4y ago

My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire

sammalloy 4y ago
> My main takeaway from this is that I need to go watch The Wire Please do. It took me a few months to get through it, but it’s worth it. The show broke many of the old conventions that were expected in a television series and paved the way for much of what we see today.

throwawaysleep 4y ago

I’ve personally learned in life to focus on excelling at being corrupt.

Haleyborough 4y ago

[dead]

formerkrogemp 4y ago

Believe in the false dilemma or else?

deathanatos 4y ago

One of the … things … that the article gets towards is that there is "make customer's problem disappear" and "fix the root cause/bug". And so many companies fail to make the distinction. E.g., Azure: there's customer support, but they only do the "make customer's problem (or really, the ticket) disappear" side of it. Woe be unto you should your problem be caused by a bug in Azure: they have no means of dealing with that. Eventually the ticket dies — usually because my patience has limits — and I am sure they count that as a "win". Ticket closed, after all … even if my problem is no longer a problem b/c I've just abandoned ship. And the amount of software/stuff out there with no means to report bugs/defects is rather astounding.

civilized 4y ago

Okay article, but lacking depth, especially in the recommendations of what we can do. > We can carefully design our metrics and think critically about the behaviors we expect them to incentivize In The Wire, the metrics are carefully designed. Homicide clearance rate is a great, practical metric. Everyone is thinking, very critically, about the behaviors they expect the metrics to incentivize. > We can extend self-awareness and critical thinking to all decisions made within an organization. In The Wire, everyone is very self-aware and thinking very critically about the decisions made within the organization. > We can look beyond metrics by qualifying success and failure. In The Wire, everyone is looking beyond the metrics. The problem with the BPD in The Wire isn't a lack self-awareness and critical thinking. It's that so many people are using their self-awareness and critical thinking to maximize their self-interest rather than the mission of the organization.

hitekker 4y ago
You're being downvoted for pointing out the make-believe that we want to believe in. Like you said, the recommendations are fantasy. The author is unwilling to delve into the darkness within the game, so his solution is essentially "bring in smarter people like myself". "Be critical or be corrupted" is a platitude that doesn't mean much other than "think harder". Ironically, it's the kind of phrase that lends itself well to corruption: it sounds good, feels good, but isn't defined, easy to abuse, and so eventually becomes another card in the game.

dirtyid 4y ago

IMO Yuen Yuen Ang's unbundled corruption index is useful model for evaluating different types of corruption, all are "bad" but not equally so. TLDR in this 2x2 matrix: https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/57/files/2021/02/Typology-of-corruption.jpg https://blogsmedia.lse.ac.uk/blogs.dir/57/files/2021/02/Typo... And how countries stack up: https://i0.wp.com/oecd-development-matters.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/fig-2-uci-all.png?resize=720%2C932&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/oecd-development-matters.org/wp-content/up... Article: https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-corruption-why-it-matters-and-how-to-do-it/ https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-c...

dredmorbius 4y ago

For excellent insights into the use, misuse, and gaming of statistics, from the source, I'd strongly recommend David Simon's lecture "The Audacity of Despair", presented at UC Berkeley on 10 December 2008. It's long at 70 minutes, but quite solid. I'd seen this several years before watching the series, and it was this lecture specifically which sold it to me. <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw> The bit on statistics starts at about 8m20s. Nutshell: If you want to find out where the dirt is done, parse some statistics.... I learned as a reporter to start despising statistics and to regard anything that was ever cited to me in advance of an argument as dubious just because somebody was pulling it out and using it. I was that cynical about it. As I got better as a reporter I realised that as soon as any of our institutions create a means of measuring how things are going in terms of quality, someone will run behind them within the institution to destroy that statistic as a meaningful measurement of anything. There's exposition around this both ahead and after, and again, there's a ton of meat in this talk.

nathias 4y ago

the game's the game

everdrive 4y ago

The wire is open to a wide range of interpretations because it was so realistic. I believe the director is famous for saying that both liberals and conservatives have commented that the Wire shows how things "really are." Presumably, it's realistic enough that people can read their own narratives into it, just as we do in real life.

frozencell 4y ago

Russia is corrupted, US is corrupted, EU is corrupted, the rest who don't comment is corrupted... Power is in individuals.

frozencell 4y ago
frozencell 4y ago
Downvoters have time to downvote but not to care about the little desperate people they are downvoting.

WalterBright 4y ago

The Wire is a great story. Star Trek is a great story. RomComs can be very entertaining. But taking life lessons from fiction is a serious mistake. I made those mistakes many times. They're fantasies dreamed up by writers, and being fantasies, those imaginary worlds work in the way the writer thinks things ought to work. The real world doesn't work that way. Real interactions among people, if they have any relationship to movie plots, is simply accidental. This is a large reason why I have slowly gravitated over the years towards reading history books rather than fiction. History is real, and it doesn't work like fiction (a beginning, a middle, an end). The life lessons in them actually work. For just one example, Star Trek is the fantasy of the benevolent dictator, embodied by Kirk, and his idiot savant advisor, Spock. I love ST as much as anyone, but the benevolent dictator is a pure fantasy.

oska 4y ago
I agree with your point about history being a great instructor but the fiction examples you gave were pop fiction, that are deliberate fantasy (and thus disastrous to think they can teach you life lessons, a point that has been repeatedly made from at least as early as Don Quixote). How about Shakespeare though?
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Literary fiction isn't any different. Why should it be? (Shakespeare in its day was pop fiction for the masses.) The examples I cited may be deliberate fantasy, but people still regard them as life lessons. For The Wire, Hahvahd even had a course of instruction on drug crime using The Wire to teach. I was amazed that people defended this.
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    The wire was written by people who worked as actual police. The stories in the wire obviously aren't true, but when I found that out it made complete sense. There's just something more real about the wire than most other shows.

l0b0 4y ago

As a senior, I consider "keeping us honest" one of my primary tasks: - It's not done until at least it's in front of the customer. - Estimates are useful, but not for any of the obvious reasons.[1] - Understand lints before silencing them. - If it's important enough to get a name, spend the time to give it a good name. [1] https://mdalmijn.com/11-laws-of-software-estimation-for-complex-work/ https://mdalmijn.com/11-laws-of-software-estimation-for-comp...

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

An entire blog post about the wire discussing "juking the stats".... And it doesn't mention "juking the stats"?