6 ms·

Coming from an old school engineering company, this article frankly reads as a little insane to me. I assumed "Code Yellow" was a catastrophe on par with a torn

by janice1999 2y ago

Coming from an old school engineering company, this article frankly reads as a little insane to me. I assumed "Code Yellow" was a catastrophe on par with a tornado hitting a factory or a massive security breach. Instead the examples are not hitting artificial growth metrics and needing to launch advertising. It's bad enough to blow up teams planned work but this is what you demand employees (not founders mind you) sacrifice their personal life for (i.e. get paid less per hour and not see their families)? The author not only acknowledges the time he is stealing from employees but that stressing them out is the point. If you're 8 years into a company and lurching from (artificial) crisis to crisis to "sweat the teams" something is seriously wrong.

monkeydreams 2y ago
I work in public health so our outages are critical to safe treatment of our patients. We have the concept of a Major Incident/Major Event (because the term Code Yellow is already co-opted to mean any administrative fault across a hospital which might impact the flow of patients). These are all-hands-on-deck moments. They may be called by any member of staff who discovers an event which will impact our service, though it will be ratified by a Major Incident Manager (MIM). While the event is underway the MIM is God; except when it affects staff welfare. If a member of staff says that they cannot attend a war room for whatever reason, then the MIM will move onto the next person up the chain, even calling in directors if they feel it is required. What is being described above is tech-bro shittery. Calling a major event because you haven't hit a sales target should keep the C-Suite up at night, sure, but calling in techs and devs and 'sacrificing the L and the B in Work Life Balance'? The C-Suite should be making the strategic decisions to reverse the decline, not suddenly drag everyone into a meeting to fix their lack of foresight and working towards an end that the average tech/dev cannot influence.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  I've been a major incident manager. It works great to have a hardass like me giving orders on a conference bridge: stuff gets fixed really fast! People pull out laptops at little league games and get it done. The outage is solved, and business goes on. I look like a genius. The problem is that, if a major incident is the only process in your organization that results in things getting done in a reasonable amount of time, there is a large temptation to declare them for everything. Somebody wasted 6 months failing to renew our contract with the payment processing vendor because other stuff was being prioritized above it? Open a major incident and we'll get them to call the vendor CEO at home on Sunday. We're a big account, so they'll answer. It's the end of the fiscal year and if we don't decomm this expensive system like was promised, a VP somewhere will lose their bonus? Declare a major incident and ElevenLathe will get it done in a few hours, even if it is Thanksgiving. I would page on-call people at any hour of the day for real emergencies without hesitation, but always asked for orders in writing to page people (not executives, but real people) who weren't on call, or for nonsense like this. This got annoying so they started assigning other incident managers to the nonsense.
  - monkeydreams 2y ago
    >there is a large temptation to declare them for everything. Agreed. We have a very tight description for an Incident and, therefore, a major Incident. We don't call MI's often but anyone can call one.
cbsmith 2y ago
It's not called a Code Red. Not all catastrophes are immediate in nature. Most organizations have incident response protocol which works well enough for an immediate catastrophe. Non-immediate, gradual threats can represent a much greater risk, because there's no inflection point (beyond "way too late") where the threat becomes so imminent as to trigger that response. Code Yellows are a mechanism to artificially force that inflection point before it is too late.
- Lammy 2y ago
  > It's not called a Code Red. The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. See Stephen Levy's In The Plex (2011) pg186: “A Code Yellow is named after a tank top of that color owned by engineering director Wayne Rosing. During Code Yellow a leader is given the shirt and can tap anyone at Google and force him or her to drop a current project to help out. Often, the Code Yellow leader escalates the emergency into a war room situation and pulls people out of their offices and into a conference room for a more extended struggle.”
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    > The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. See Stephen Levy's In The Plex (2011) pg186: Yes, I know. I was making a rhetorical point using a metaphor.
  - vitus 2y ago
    > The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. Um, no. Today, Google has Code Reds, Code Yellows, Code Purples, and Code Greens... and this is after standardizing to remove other made-up terms like Code Mauve. I wish I were making up these terms.
    - asciimike 2y ago
      Not sure why it's getting downvoted, definitely experienced Code Yellows, Code Reds and Code Purples at Google. Red is (obviously) worse than Yellow and IIRC was a total code freeze for a period of time. IIRC there was a Code Red around memory at some point because the supply chain was literally so backed up that google couldn't get enough DIMMs and reasonably sized services had to stop deploying because there wasn't enough compute capacity. Purple is/was "developer experience is so bad we need to stop developing new functionality and make the current functionality usable."
AlexandrB 2y ago
There's definitely a "delusions of grandeur" thing that happens with some startups. "Come join our incredible journey to change the world by micro-optimizing ad placement on image boards."
ponow 2y ago
[flagged]
- HomeDeLaPot 2y ago
  Unhappy with your current government? You can always move to another country. Staying is acceptance of the current expression of terms of citizenship.
- snowfarthing 2y ago
  It doesn't matter if it's literally stealing -- it's the mentality that is important here. Sure, you could always quit -- but the thing is, if you're pushing for these kinds of policies, you may very well push your best talent to accepting that option!

monkeydreams 2y ago

I work in public health so our outages are critical to safe treatment of our patients. We have the concept of a Major Incident/Major Event (because the term Code Yellow is already co-opted to mean any administrative fault across a hospital which might impact the flow of patients). These are all-hands-on-deck moments. They may be called by any member of staff who discovers an event which will impact our service, though it will be ratified by a Major Incident Manager (MIM). While the event is underway the MIM is God; except when it affects staff welfare. If a member of staff says that they cannot attend a war room for whatever reason, then the MIM will move onto the next person up the chain, even calling in directors if they feel it is required. What is being described above is tech-bro shittery. Calling a major event because you haven't hit a sales target should keep the C-Suite up at night, sure, but calling in techs and devs and 'sacrificing the L and the B in Work Life Balance'? The C-Suite should be making the strategic decisions to reverse the decline, not suddenly drag everyone into a meeting to fix their lack of foresight and working towards an end that the average tech/dev cannot influence.

ElevenLathe 2y ago
I've been a major incident manager. It works great to have a hardass like me giving orders on a conference bridge: stuff gets fixed really fast! People pull out laptops at little league games and get it done. The outage is solved, and business goes on. I look like a genius. The problem is that, if a major incident is the only process in your organization that results in things getting done in a reasonable amount of time, there is a large temptation to declare them for everything. Somebody wasted 6 months failing to renew our contract with the payment processing vendor because other stuff was being prioritized above it? Open a major incident and we'll get them to call the vendor CEO at home on Sunday. We're a big account, so they'll answer. It's the end of the fiscal year and if we don't decomm this expensive system like was promised, a VP somewhere will lose their bonus? Declare a major incident and ElevenLathe will get it done in a few hours, even if it is Thanksgiving. I would page on-call people at any hour of the day for real emergencies without hesitation, but always asked for orders in writing to page people (not executives, but real people) who weren't on call, or for nonsense like this. This got annoying so they started assigning other incident managers to the nonsense.
- monkeydreams 2y ago
  >there is a large temptation to declare them for everything. Agreed. We have a very tight description for an Incident and, therefore, a major Incident. We don't call MI's often but anyone can call one.

cbsmith 2y ago

It's not called a Code Red. Not all catastrophes are immediate in nature. Most organizations have incident response protocol which works well enough for an immediate catastrophe. Non-immediate, gradual threats can represent a much greater risk, because there's no inflection point (beyond "way too late") where the threat becomes so imminent as to trigger that response. Code Yellows are a mechanism to artificially force that inflection point before it is too late.

Lammy 2y ago
> It's not called a Code Red. The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. See Stephen Levy's In The Plex (2011) pg186: “A Code Yellow is named after a tank top of that color owned by engineering director Wayne Rosing. During Code Yellow a leader is given the shirt and can tap anyone at Google and force him or her to drop a current project to help out. Often, the Code Yellow leader escalates the emergency into a war room situation and pulls people out of their offices and into a conference room for a more extended struggle.”
- cbsmith 2y ago
  > The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. See Stephen Levy's In The Plex (2011) pg186: Yes, I know. I was making a rhetorical point using a metaphor.
- vitus 2y ago
  > The etymology is not green/yellow/red. It's just not-Yellow or yes-Yellow. Um, no. Today, Google has Code Reds, Code Yellows, Code Purples, and Code Greens... and this is after standardizing to remove other made-up terms like Code Mauve. I wish I were making up these terms.
  - asciimike 2y ago
    Not sure why it's getting downvoted, definitely experienced Code Yellows, Code Reds and Code Purples at Google. Red is (obviously) worse than Yellow and IIRC was a total code freeze for a period of time. IIRC there was a Code Red around memory at some point because the supply chain was literally so backed up that google couldn't get enough DIMMs and reasonably sized services had to stop deploying because there wasn't enough compute capacity. Purple is/was "developer experience is so bad we need to stop developing new functionality and make the current functionality usable."

AlexandrB 2y ago

There's definitely a "delusions of grandeur" thing that happens with some startups. "Come join our incredible journey to change the world by micro-optimizing ad placement on image boards."

ponow 2y ago

[flagged]

HomeDeLaPot 2y ago
Unhappy with your current government? You can always move to another country. Staying is acceptance of the current expression of terms of citizenship.
snowfarthing 2y ago
It doesn't matter if it's literally stealing -- it's the mentality that is important here. Sure, you could always quit -- but the thing is, if you're pushing for these kinds of policies, you may very well push your best talent to accepting that option!