7 ms·

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podca

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me badly because I’m not an engineer”. https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/1664616242110427136 https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/16646162421104271... Ben: This was a meetup at, I think it was Denver 2014. We were standing outside an arcade. The evening outing was a lot of pinball fun and air hockey. And one of our community managers was standing outside, and we got to talking, and he said to me, “You know, I was actually kind of surprised. You’re a really nice guy.” https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ It's interesting to me as a warning. I think treating developers really well is important. But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems.

throw1234651234 3y ago
[flagged]
veave 3y ago
[flagged]
- acyou 3y ago
  Based on what is it pretty clear that everything went downhill when engineers stopped calling the shots?
- i80and 3y ago
  I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about. All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".
  - WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
    Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company. I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro) Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE. What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected. I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    "Optimising for efficiency" on a personal/personnel/social level is one of the most common forms of rudeness in every day life. It generally _is_ rudeness.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Politeness, is of course, when you hate the other person so much that you waste their time with all the various social rituals.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      Only when that appreciation for optimization is not shared between all participants. It is equally correct that someone who is not interested in social minutia is having their time wasted by having it inflicted on them, and this, too, is rude.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    > ...do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions That's getting someone to change their mind 101. Not an engineer exclusive insight. I think a lot of "oh engineers are so rational that's why people think we're so rude" is just post hoc rationalization for poor social skills.
- duxup 3y ago
  I don't know if it is normal or not, but it certainly shouldn't be.
thathndude 3y ago
As a non-engineer user, I know I have regularly felt unwelcome in various ways.
duxup 3y ago
Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere. Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it. The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results. I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.
- pbourke 3y ago
  As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system. A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system. Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but we don’t always have that luxury. Circling back to your point, it’s ironic that maintenance is the lowest-value activity in terms of big tech company reward systems.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Sometimes they can be well architected to a fault! I worked on a periphery of a big mainframe system that was designed and implemented before I was born. I think release 1 was in 1975. It still runs really well and is hard to displace because operationally, even though the people who understood it fully are retired or dead, they left behind strong materials so a moderately intelligent person can run everything. The “other” systems, old .Net, Java, etc that support the interfaces to the old app are hot garbage, and tend to steal the budget dollars that are needed to migrate off the 1970s stuff. My team had to fix one of these… argh.
  - duxup 3y ago
    When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why. God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems. This is hard to quantify, and to make objective. E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager. Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring. Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it. It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.
    - at_a_remove 3y ago
      I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?
chucksmash 3y ago
corecursive.com is your podcast?
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

throw1234651234 3y ago

[flagged]

veave 3y ago

[flagged]

acyou 3y ago
Based on what is it pretty clear that everything went downhill when engineers stopped calling the shots?
i80and 3y ago
I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about. All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".
- WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
  Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company. I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.
gonzo41 3y ago
I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro) Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE. What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.
hattmall 3y ago
Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected. I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  "Optimising for efficiency" on a personal/personnel/social level is one of the most common forms of rudeness in every day life. It generally _is_ rudeness.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    Politeness, is of course, when you hate the other person so much that you waste their time with all the various social rituals.
  - Karunamon 3y ago
    Only when that appreciation for optimization is not shared between all participants. It is equally correct that someone who is not interested in social minutia is having their time wasted by having it inflicted on them, and this, too, is rude.
- hooverd 3y ago
  > ...do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions That's getting someone to change their mind 101. Not an engineer exclusive insight. I think a lot of "oh engineers are so rational that's why people think we're so rude" is just post hoc rationalization for poor social skills.
duxup 3y ago
I don't know if it is normal or not, but it certainly shouldn't be.

thathndude 3y ago

As a non-engineer user, I know I have regularly felt unwelcome in various ways.

duxup 3y ago

Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere. Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it. The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results. I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.

pbourke 3y ago
As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system. A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system. Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but we don’t always have that luxury. Circling back to your point, it’s ironic that maintenance is the lowest-value activity in terms of big tech company reward systems.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  Sometimes they can be well architected to a fault! I worked on a periphery of a big mainframe system that was designed and implemented before I was born. I think release 1 was in 1975. It still runs really well and is hard to displace because operationally, even though the people who understood it fully are retired or dead, they left behind strong materials so a moderately intelligent person can run everything. The “other” systems, old .Net, Java, etc that support the interfaces to the old app are hot garbage, and tend to steal the budget dollars that are needed to migrate off the 1970s stuff. My team had to fix one of these… argh.
- duxup 3y ago
  When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why. God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems. This is hard to quantify, and to make objective. E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager. Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.

at_a_remove 3y ago
How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring. Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it. It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.
  - at_a_remove 3y ago
    I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?

chucksmash 3y ago

corecursive.com is your podcast?

adamgordonbell 3y ago
Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]