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I used to live in Montreal. Cabs there need to get a safety inspection like every 6 months. Talking to some cab drivers there, many of them remarked that the p

• resonious 3y ago
  It's bad but I consider doing this for code review sometimes.
  • ysavir 3y ago
    I tend to do this in code review. But what I consider critical is that it comes without a "I want this changed" mentality, and instead a "let's find something we can improve on for next time" mentality. The current PR can go in as-is, but we should aim for always getting better at the craft.
  • mejutoco 3y ago
    This reminds me...many graphic designers knows to have a bad version of a design. What they do not expect is the customer picking that one. It explains some campaigns though
    • psunavy03 3y ago
      It's not just graphic design. It's customary in military planning to give the commander multiple possible courses of action or COAs to choose from or blend together. But it's a known danger when you're crunched for time that if you plan a "throwaway COA" that's subpar or silly because the boss wants X COAs and you can only come up with X-1, beware. Because there's a chance the boss is going to moth off on the throwaway COA.
    • gosub100 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(1967_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(1967_film)
• miroljub 3y ago
  Another example of "what you measure is what you get".
  • morkalork 3y ago
    And because they keep finding those obviously wrong things, the program justifies itself!
• notahacker 3y ago
  My boat is for sale. Most prospective buyers will get a marine survey which will identify that among other minor things it needs a new bilge pump. If they don't pay for the survey I'll sort them out with a new bilge pump anyway. (This isn't an argument against surveyors though. Mine sorted me out with a new gearbox and had half the boat rewired at the vendor's expense)
• brightball 3y ago
  One of my earliest bosses was the main web developer for a telco's marketing department. He would get everything working and ready the way that it needed to be, then prior to showing it to marketing would change something to be clearly wrong. In my example, he just put a red line down the middle of one section that looked out of place. Marketing would review it and say, "Everything looks good, let's just change that red line there. Thanks!" I asked him why he did that and he said that if he didn't give them something obvious to change, they would find something that was working that didn't need to be changed.
  • sokoloff 3y ago
    The 2007-02-02 Dilbert applies: https://assets.amuniversal.com/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71c47 https://assets.amuniversal.com/9df021106cc801301d50001dd8b71...
    • mathattack 3y ago
      And Scott Adams also previously worked at a Telco.
    • begueradj 3y ago
      That's funny and a good summary
  • sambeau 3y ago
    I have a friend who works in games who would secretly add a malloc to the initialisation code that would just hold onto a large chunk of memory. Come the point just before release, where everyone was desperately trying to fit the final assets into memory, and about to throw stuff out, he would do an 'optimisation' pass and free up the memory so they could ship without delay.
    • groestl 3y ago
      Oh, "the balloon". A quite common technique.
  • 3y ago
• faet 3y ago
  This is how it is in some motorsports series as well. I had a teacher who was a mechanic for a racing team. They'd leave something 'big' broken for tech so that the people would find it, have them fix it. He said they'd miss a bunch of smaller stuff, but would feel accomplished for finding the 'big' error.
• taeric 3y ago
  I have this same problem with a lot of review culture at many companies. Turns out, if you send people into a meeting with the idea that they will be criticizing something, they will find criticisms. The hard part is distinguishing things that need changing, versus musings that are as much evidence that the team was looking.