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Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? In my experience, being able to produce something of quality is gained only throu

Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? In my experience, being able to produce something of quality is gained only through practice, practice, practice.

ordersofmag 3y ago
Good teaching largely consists of setting the learner up in situations where they can practice effectively. To pick just one example many people are taught to improve the quality of their writing. This largely consists of giving guidance on what writing to attempt and (more importantly) guidance how to reflect on the quality of the writing you've just done so you can improve.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? Every industrial practice. On the other hand, the title just means that programming is not an industrial practice. What should be obvious to anybody that looked, but some people insist on not seeing it.
- addicted 3y ago
  Yeah and you can see other disciplines like Aviation where there are so many incredible processes to ensure learning and constant improvement.
  - piloto_ciego 3y ago
    How I just said this, as I transition to being a dev/engineer person… I find the lack frustrating at times.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    For pilots, there are many filters to ensure people that failed to learn can't take many responsibilities. They ensure the pilots study and train, but there isn't any theory making sure the pilots learn and get the best safety practices. (In fact, if you are comparing with CS teaching, pilot teaching will give you a heart attack.) For engineers, the situation is very similar to software. There are many tools for enforcing quality, but there's no structure for teaching the engineers, and no, there isn't a widely accepted theory for how to teach design quality either. The one place where people are consistently taught how to build quality is on manufacturing.
  - Syntonicles 3y ago
    Will you please elaborate?
    - WJW 3y ago
      Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations. This has both pros and cons. The pros is that every airline learns from the mistakes made by every other airline and over time the system becomes really quite safe indeed. The cons are that it is quite expensive and time consuming. Imagine if every software company was obliged by law to: - Every single release has to have been signed off by someone who got their "software release engineer" certification at the software equivalent of the FAA. - This engineer is required by law to not sign off unless every box on a 534 item checklist has been manually verified. - Any time an unplanned downtime happens at any company, a government team comes in to investigate the root cause and add points nr 535 through 567 to the checklist to make sure it never happens again. If such a system was mandated for software companies, most of the common bugs would very rapidly become a thing of the past. Development velocity would also fall through the floor though, and most startups would probably die overnight. Only companies that could support the overhead of such a heavyweight process would be viable, and the barrier to entry would massively increase.
      - bluGill 3y ago
        I wish someone would create that 500 line checklist. I've seem attempts, but they tend to be either not actionable (is the software high quality - meaningless), or of metrics that are just gamed (is test code coverage > 80%?)
        MaxBarraclough 3y ago
        Not quite what you're asking for, but the Joint Strike Fighter C++ Coding Standards document is freely available. [0] It's 141 pages. It's specific to the complex and unsafe C++ language though, rather than addressing broader software development methodology. [0] [PDF] https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
- rockemsockem 3y ago
  Citation needed. The key to the industrial revolution was trivializing the human work so as to take as many human errors out as possible and to systematize everything. I wouldn't call that type of process "teaching quality".
- randomdata 3y ago
  What industrial practice isn't guided by carefully designed machines that remove the human variability?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    You probably meant "that remove some human variability". Machine handling requires a lot of training and a lot of well thought out procedures.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      And, most importantly, practice, practice, practice.
randomdrake 3y ago
The arts. The further and further you go in instruction, the more it becomes about the little differences and quality. Practice always helps, but quality definitely taught and learned by many as well.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
piloto_ciego 3y ago
Absolutely. I cannot fly professionally anymore due to health, but this is something we are taught in aviation and something I too find lacking from tech so far. Like, you’re taught the standards as part of learning to fly, but as time goes on, you’re told to narrow your tolerance of what is acceptable. So if you are learning how to do steep turns, for instance, the altitude standard is +- 100’. You’re taught, “that’s the minimum, you should be trying for 50’” and then 20’, then the absolute best performance would be where you do your turn, the needle doesn’t move, and as you roll out on a calm day you fly through your wake. But the goal is “better, always better, what can I do better?” And flying is not graded on the overall performance, if you don’t do satisfactory everywhere you fail. Culturally satisfactory, isn’t, it’s the starting point. That encourages a much more collaborative model I feel like. I’ve only worked one or two flying jobs that were not collaborative. In the outside world it sometimes feels the opposite. In flying, you truly want everyone to succeed and do well, and the company does. Even the guys I hated that I flew with, I didn’t want them to fail. If they failed, I was partially responsible for that. It wasn’t always perfect, and I worked with some legendary assholes while I was flying, but truly, they supported me and I supported them, and if I screwed up (or they screwed up) the culture required that we found a way to minimize the future potential screwups. You’re actually trained on what quality means in a wide variety of contexts too, and flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) is a big part of many airlines. In smaller bush operations where I worked, it is significantly more informal, but we truly had a “no fault” culture in nearly all the places I worked. It’s not perfect, but that’s the point, “ok how can we make this better?” If someone had an idea for how to do something better, there may have been friction, but that was rare if it actually was better, and as soon as you could show how adoption was fast even at the less standardized operations I worked at. Not saying it’s all unicorns and rainbows, but I feel like quality, and decision making, and “doing the right thing” were an integral part of the culture of aviation. “The weather is too bad and I cannot do this safely” grounds the flight, you don’t blast off into the shit (at reputable operators) to get the job done anymore (it’s not 1995), and it feels like this new industry is the opposite. The entire concept of a “minimum viable product” is somewhat illustrative of the problem. It shouldn’t be the “minimum viable” it should be the “minimum quality product we’re willing to accept as a starting point.” But that doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way. We shouldn’t be striving for anything that’s the “minimum.” The minimum is only the beginning.
globular-toast 3y ago
Practice only matters if you try to produce quality. If you just practice producing crap you'll only get good at producing crap. But I suppose if someone doesn't care about quality (and these people do exist) all bets are off really.

Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? In my experience, being able to produce something of quality is gained only through practice, practice, practice.

ordersofmag 3y ago

Good teaching largely consists of setting the learner up in situations where they can practice effectively. To pick just one example many people are taught to improve the quality of their writing. This largely consists of giving guidance on what writing to attempt and (more importantly) guidance how to reflect on the quality of the writing you've just done so you can improve.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> Is there any human activity where quality is an attribute successfully taught? Every industrial practice. On the other hand, the title just means that programming is not an industrial practice. What should be obvious to anybody that looked, but some people insist on not seeing it.

addicted 3y ago
Yeah and you can see other disciplines like Aviation where there are so many incredible processes to ensure learning and constant improvement.
- piloto_ciego 3y ago
  How I just said this, as I transition to being a dev/engineer person… I find the lack frustrating at times.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  For pilots, there are many filters to ensure people that failed to learn can't take many responsibilities. They ensure the pilots study and train, but there isn't any theory making sure the pilots learn and get the best safety practices. (In fact, if you are comparing with CS teaching, pilot teaching will give you a heart attack.) For engineers, the situation is very similar to software. There are many tools for enforcing quality, but there's no structure for teaching the engineers, and no, there isn't a widely accepted theory for how to teach design quality either. The one place where people are consistently taught how to build quality is on manufacturing.
- Syntonicles 3y ago
  Will you please elaborate?
  - WJW 3y ago
    Aviation in particular has a very strong culture around (government mandated) checklists and post-crash investigations. This has both pros and cons. The pros is that every airline learns from the mistakes made by every other airline and over time the system becomes really quite safe indeed. The cons are that it is quite expensive and time consuming. Imagine if every software company was obliged by law to: - Every single release has to have been signed off by someone who got their "software release engineer" certification at the software equivalent of the FAA. - This engineer is required by law to not sign off unless every box on a 534 item checklist has been manually verified. - Any time an unplanned downtime happens at any company, a government team comes in to investigate the root cause and add points nr 535 through 567 to the checklist to make sure it never happens again. If such a system was mandated for software companies, most of the common bugs would very rapidly become a thing of the past. Development velocity would also fall through the floor though, and most startups would probably die overnight. Only companies that could support the overhead of such a heavyweight process would be viable, and the barrier to entry would massively increase.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      I wish someone would create that 500 line checklist. I've seem attempts, but they tend to be either not actionable (is the software high quality - meaningless), or of metrics that are just gamed (is test code coverage > 80%?)
      - MaxBarraclough 3y ago
        Not quite what you're asking for, but the Joint Strike Fighter C++ Coding Standards document is freely available. [0] It's 141 pages. It's specific to the complex and unsafe C++ language though, rather than addressing broader software development methodology. [0] [PDF] https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
rockemsockem 3y ago
Citation needed. The key to the industrial revolution was trivializing the human work so as to take as many human errors out as possible and to systematize everything. I wouldn't call that type of process "teaching quality".
randomdata 3y ago
What industrial practice isn't guided by carefully designed machines that remove the human variability?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  You probably meant "that remove some human variability". Machine handling requires a lot of training and a lot of well thought out procedures.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    And, most importantly, practice, practice, practice.

randomdrake 3y ago

The arts. The further and further you go in instruction, the more it becomes about the little differences and quality. Practice always helps, but quality definitely taught and learned by many as well.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

piloto_ciego 3y ago

Absolutely. I cannot fly professionally anymore due to health, but this is something we are taught in aviation and something I too find lacking from tech so far. Like, you’re taught the standards as part of learning to fly, but as time goes on, you’re told to narrow your tolerance of what is acceptable. So if you are learning how to do steep turns, for instance, the altitude standard is +- 100’. You’re taught, “that’s the minimum, you should be trying for 50’” and then 20’, then the absolute best performance would be where you do your turn, the needle doesn’t move, and as you roll out on a calm day you fly through your wake. But the goal is “better, always better, what can I do better?” And flying is not graded on the overall performance, if you don’t do satisfactory everywhere you fail. Culturally satisfactory, isn’t, it’s the starting point. That encourages a much more collaborative model I feel like. I’ve only worked one or two flying jobs that were not collaborative. In the outside world it sometimes feels the opposite. In flying, you truly want everyone to succeed and do well, and the company does. Even the guys I hated that I flew with, I didn’t want them to fail. If they failed, I was partially responsible for that. It wasn’t always perfect, and I worked with some legendary assholes while I was flying, but truly, they supported me and I supported them, and if I screwed up (or they screwed up) the culture required that we found a way to minimize the future potential screwups. You’re actually trained on what quality means in a wide variety of contexts too, and flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) is a big part of many airlines. In smaller bush operations where I worked, it is significantly more informal, but we truly had a “no fault” culture in nearly all the places I worked. It’s not perfect, but that’s the point, “ok how can we make this better?” If someone had an idea for how to do something better, there may have been friction, but that was rare if it actually was better, and as soon as you could show how adoption was fast even at the less standardized operations I worked at. Not saying it’s all unicorns and rainbows, but I feel like quality, and decision making, and “doing the right thing” were an integral part of the culture of aviation. “The weather is too bad and I cannot do this safely” grounds the flight, you don’t blast off into the shit (at reputable operators) to get the job done anymore (it’s not 1995), and it feels like this new industry is the opposite. The entire concept of a “minimum viable product” is somewhat illustrative of the problem. It shouldn’t be the “minimum viable” it should be the “minimum quality product we’re willing to accept as a starting point.” But that doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way. We shouldn’t be striving for anything that’s the “minimum.” The minimum is only the beginning.

globular-toast 3y ago

Practice only matters if you try to produce quality. If you just practice producing crap you'll only get good at producing crap. But I suppose if someone doesn't care about quality (and these people do exist) all bets are off really.