4 ms·
In Germany, there is a saying: „Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht. Das haben wir noch nie anders gemacht. Da könnte ja jeder kommen.“ In English, this roug
by Ringz 2y ago
In Germany, there is a saying:
„Das haben wir schon immer so gemacht. Das haben wir noch nie anders gemacht. Da könnte ja jeder kommen.“
In English, this roughly means:
"We have always done it this way. We have never done it differently. Anyone could come along and say that."
That explains a lot.
- throw_pm23 2y agoIn most cases, this attitude is a competitive advantage. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton's_fence https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton's_fence
- bogota 2y agoI would have a hard time believing that. I work with a company that hired a lot of germans and they have the worst developer experience onboarding and general infra of any place i have worked. When you outline why it’s bad and show how you would significantly speed up over 1000 engineers at the company with minimal work the answer is to leave it the same as is and “fix the issue” with some new process. Needless to say once my shares vest this year im gone. It is really such a bad environment to work in. I should note that the shares have been on a decade decline and i was brought in to fix these exact issues but no one at the company cares or puts in more than the bare minimum before clocking out for the day. I can’t fix an issue if people think it’s ok to spin up a new k8s instance for every single service, are ok spending a month after starting asking to be put in the right AD groups, and hand deploy almost everything.
- jiggawatts 2y agoThat’s the norm in most places. People are comfortable with rote, repetitive work like manual deployments. If you automate that away, then the only things left are the unique, unpredictable, and uncomfortable parts. People don’t like that and will actively resist. If you don’t have buy in and authority from senior management (CIO / CTO level), just give up. If you thought you did but you’re still unable to enact change then you need to go back to senior leadership with everything translated into dollars. Not “better” or “faster”! Has to be “cheaper”!
- constantcrying 2y agoIn many cases it isn't. As long as technological innovation doesn't slow down this attitude will haunt a company/individual/nation. Chesterton's fence is about knocking over established things without knowing why you are doing so. In engineering there are often good reasons to try new things, so you need some willingness to leave behind what you known. Germany is still the third largest economy in the world, if it wants to remain there it needs to be able to adapt. German companies are definitely suffering from having large parts of the organization with people with that attitude, who don't want to learn new things and who don't even want to know if there might be a better way.
- nrclark 2y agoIf you were trying to convince a german to abandon old/bad process, what would be a convincing / resonant counter-statement?
- cjbgkagh 2y ago* not German by AFAIK its governance by appeals to authority. There is a bit of dominance power play where you each try to establish that your rules have the most authority. Appeals to correctness are best done with an authoritative determination on said correctness. One way to avoid the power play confrontation is by letting them make the new rules which incorporate the changes you want. It’s different to the Russian powerplay on who can get away with telling the biggest lies without being called out on it. The more outlandish and obvious the lie the stronger the signal of dominance.
- constantcrying 2y agoYou can not teach someone who doesn't want to learn. If you want an organization to change, you need people who are willing to demonstrate that change and show its superiority.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoA big part of life is influencing others act in your interest even when it’s against their interests, we can’t replace people with better people and must work with the people we have. Sure you could try your luck elsewhere but that does not solve this problem. Appeals to superiority are not where I would start.
- constantcrying 2y agoI think you totally misunderstood me. What I was advocating was that you give those willing to learn new things the ability to implement their ideas and by that their colleagues will see that there is a better way. The most important thing is getting the others to want to learn.
- solarkraft 2y ago
- lifestyleguru 2y agoVery zmart, so how they have always been dealing with the internet, demographic crisis, and EVs? It's just an arrogant and lazy dismissal.