I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves.
Meanwhile, my perfectly purring department was struggling to keep the lights on.
It's a serious problem in this industry due to the disconnect between non-technical management (who understands how to double click) and engineering (who holds the company standing).
<insert IBM story about IT department cost cuts>
I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.
By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities. Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organisation isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.
Building the right incentives around that can be tricky, those incentives need to ensure the highest levels of management aren't themselves disincentivising their directs & their departments from surfacing pain & problems - but it's also pretty common for people to mask those signals purely out of a well-intentioned desire to help. It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.
Too many companies ground their performance incentives & processes around oversimplified ideas that don't match the reality of human behaviour
Often, 'leaders' make mistakes and people below suffer the consequences. It is important to let these leaders deal with the pain caused by their decisions from their cluelessness about how things work.
The problem is it's systemic. Ultimately, pain needs to come from outside. As long as society rewards incompetence, we'll have incompetent organizations.
No it does not need to come from the outside. If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding. If you're heroically obscuring the fact that things are falling apart you won't. That means even if you could somehow, heroically fix it, it isn't perceived as such if nobody ever felt the problem and saw you fix it.
This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.
> This is a pain signal. Some IT dude saying things are crap in every meeting is not.
More often than not it is some IT dude observing network crap-out once a month, performing analysis, noticing an upward trend and then saying in every meeting that things are crap and there will be issues twice a week in some time.
> If you're an underfunded IT department and your network has an issue twice a week, you will get that funding.
More often than not, if the IT department is already neglected they will not get that funding. Things will be delayed until the crap outs eventually actually happen twice a week and then some external heroic consultants will be hired to fix the issue underfunded IT department "could not".
IT doesnt control the funding so at that point its not an issue of awareness but a management decision to live with this problem and focus funding elsewhere
more often than not, many things in the business are on fire and underfunded at the same time. you can get recognition for your work without the problem being permanently solved the right way, and it may not result in more funding but peopel will think of you for new opportunities that pop up later as someone who is reliable.
if you dont think the recognition will happen and youre just burning out solving these problems then stop solving them. new problem pops up thats outside your job description, its not your problem. generally though if youre working for someone like that anything you do is a lose-lose
It comes back to communication. If management acknowledges the issue but redirects budget elsewhere due to priorities, it's legit. Communicating it in a way IT personnel understand and accept isn't necessarily easy. Sometimes there's also incentive for management to avoid it altogether (we need to focus elsewhere and this could burn you out, but you're an acceptable loss).
That said, management needs to know there's pain and in a language it speaks - risk. Cost, legal, whatever. Preferably quantified without drowning them in numbers or fear mongering. That's what pain is all about.
How did you make the illogical leap to “could not”?
Repeatedly requesting time/budget to fix an ongoing issue is a requirement of any half-decent manager. If they’re reporting issues then just smiling blankly when asked “what can we do about it?” they’ve failed their basic job duty.
The problem is sometimes management knows who the heroes are and so by not fixing things they know you are not competent. Thus letting things bubble up isn't always a good plan. It is really hard when you are on the bottom to know which case things are.
The problem is that management witnesses the pain, but the response isn't to adjust behavior, it is then to punish the limb where the pain originated from. The reason that people pull heroics is also because the organization isn't healthy, and cannot reflect on its actions. Papering over organizational flaws is a symptom of a larger, often unseen problem. If it was healthy, someone would have already said, "hey, I think we need to work on this networking component" and it would have been looked at.
Pain propagation, to use the corpus metaphor isn't enough.
> If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.
At some point in one's early single-digit they learn that touching hot stuff hurts. They start to avoid stuff that they know is hot, but still come in contact with hot stuff accidentally. Later they learn techniques minimizing probability of touching hot stuff even by accident. By the time one reaches twenty or so, the only times a person burns themselves is really by being way too reckless.
> Like it or not, sometimes the best thing for an organization isn't to just fix every problem and prevent it from bubbling up; it needs to be treated like a learning opportunity for org leadership, which means sending the pain signals upward before just repairing it.
Should we accept that management as a whole is in general more clueless than your average teenager? The "learning opportunity" should, ideally, happen exactly once, realistically once in a very rare while.
> It's important to coach people on the idea that in large group sizes, it's more efficient to let certain kinds of problems play out and not be so reactive to them.
You are conflating two things here, I guess. Yes, some "problems" are not worth to be fixed proactively or at all, but that has very little to do with group sizes, it's a "simple" cost-benefit tradeoff. As groups grow the left hands tend to become increasingly unaware of what the right is doing and that is the primary reason why we have management class in the first place.
The problem OP raises is attention span of the metaphorical gold fish in the management layers. Even if a department does everything in their power to communicate impending problems, do risk weighed cost-benefit analyses, get proactive treatments pre-approved by higher management, the same higher management forgets the risks and costs savings once they have been mitigated, effectively incentivizing firefighting. Some teams gradually fall into eternal firefighting and burn out, others start manufacturing fires to get rewarded. The biggest problem is that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart.
Unlike a teenage child, management has the unfortunate effect of being made up of people who can leave the company, forget past experience, etc. So you do kind of have to treat them like a child who needs continuous feedback and signals.
For a more broad example than IT cost center stuff, you can look at how some large companies go through cycles of arrogance with their customer bases, launch a product that fails, and then are humbled enough to try and pivot and earn good will back. Microsoft is always somewhere in this cycle for instance. The organization can never really learn this lesson permanently and will "regress" from time to time based on financial pressure or greed or some other impulse.
In the original DK experiment they asked students after they had taken a test that where would their score end up compared to their classmates (which they had no knowledge of). Obviously they picked scores around the middle*
Which resulted in top students 'undervaluating themselves' and bottom students 'overestimating themselves'. Or under/overvaluating a random future variable that they don't have knowledge of, at least.
The original DK paper actually shows a positive correlation between the guesses and the test results: students are generally aware how they are among their peers, and smarter students guessed higher than studetns with less time to study on their hand.
This being said, the 'DK effect' is something people talk about, and it might exist, and it might be perceived by people. It's just that the original DK paper does not support it.
* another lesser talked problem with the DK paper is that people don't actually believe the answers they give, because the question is nonsensical.
If someone just takes a test, they won't think that "I'm sure I'll end up the 24% this time". Even if they are forced to anwser this question, even then they won't believe it, because that's not how random and future work. People are generally aware of about where they will perform (with positive correlation, in fact the original DK paper shows it) but they are not aware of results of specific, random future events, and they are not claiming that they know the results of specific, random future events, or believe it in their hearts.
DK paper tries to frame them as they were actually believing this, but they are not.
Can't we just get to the pop culture version of the DK effect by deduction?
It seems reasonable to assume that for some group of intellects they are not smart enough to know how not smart they are. There is no definite boundary where this effect is either on or off, therefore there are probably some gradations to this awareness as you climb up the intelligence ladder.
Another way of putting it: if dumb people had more insight they would cease to be dumb.
Honestly? I’m just super direct with the exec team now after trying to do this dance. Obviously this is not allowed at every company, I’m just lucky to be at a place where the company culture allows for this.
I’ll ask for something preventative or that otherwise hardens our systems. They ask “is it a need?” and I’ll say something like “we can function without, but that means we have a 5-10% chance in the next 6mo of having a major failure and embarrassing ourselves in front of a live audience in the thousands as well as our client.” They then decide how much that risk is worth to them, and whatever they decide is kind of out of my hands at that point. If the thing I warned them of comes because they didn’t pay for it, I can point to the receipts (though I’ve never had to, we’re small enough people remember those conversations).
60% of the time they just get what I need maybe? But ultimately it’s about CYA. Tell them what’s up, tell them what the solution is, tell them what the consequences are if they don’t do the solution, and make them decide.
Again this obviously depends on company culture and structure, but I can’t imagine on the only person who can do this!
An example that not all companies are run by idiots. The job market is not a healthy market though, where its more important to know ppl then to be great at some skill. But if leadership sucks just leave if you can, that will fix the problem.
> By building pain into the system. If your hands dealt with injury directly without sending pain signals up to your brain, you'd never change the behaviour that led to that harm or reconsider your priorities.
I don't think that's it. Emergent problems require attention and action from leadership, who in turn can make the problem visible to higher ups. This creates signal, and positive feedback when the problem is fixed or mitigated.
If the problem doesn't exist to begin with, there is no signal. Managers don't get to show their fast-acting skills, and there are no heroics to speak of.
So ultimately poorly maintained and managed projects who deliver fixes for problems of their own doing create a perverse incentive, whereas no one is lauded or promoted for doing normal day-to-day things.
Well I think it is even more complex. If you're a plumber in a rotten system of pipes the whole company depends on, you can fix issues day in and day out, without speaking a word and they will notice everything is a bit unreliable and thus you do a bad job. You could do the exact same work, but make a big thing about every major fix, warn people a week ahead, give them the feeling the company depends on it and then do the exact same work and tell them how you fixed it. Suddenly you did a good job, despite you literally doing the exact same thing with your hands.
The difference is how it was communicated. Most non-Tech/non-infrastructure-people got no clue about these things. If they know you're battling the demons of plumbing on their behalf they will thank you, if you're the weird guy that has smeared dirt in the face and is seen once a week while the plumbing fails ever so often, guess what.
That means even if the problems and their fixes remain the same, the communication around them really matters. Tech people can be extremely bad with this. And if we're talking IT it is really the plumbing that holds the company together.
In my 35+ years in IT, the "hero attitude" was the one in the top three I most hated traits in a person working with or for me. And talking about traits, I considered crucial to always have in my teams a "saboteur" engineer - the one who thoght, found, come up with all the way we could break a design, service, infra components, app, etc., when all the others were designing or operating for perfect or normal conditions.
Genuine heroism - a willingness to step up when needed - isn't a bad thing in itself. But /needing/ a hero just to function means the system is fundamentally broken. Maybe it's a bad process, maybe it's understaffing, maybe it's neglected maintenance, maybe it's a lack of contingency planning. But there's no reason everyone can't go home at 5 PM every night and still get things done.
Love the "saboteur" approach. I honestly want to be one my own career in IT, but as you have rightfully conveyed, "hero attitude" is what gets you visibility!
At a previous job the CEO/owner had the idea that you'd get some percentage of any cost saving your could find as a bonus. Something like 20% of the savings for the first year.
My colleague in the IT department had one idea, replace our commercial certificates with Let's Encrypt and drop the EV requirement. In total he'd stand to get a bonus of a little over €2000. He never got the money, because things like that was part of his job apparently.
Even dumber, they've now got a disgruntled employee, and everyone around them knows they were cheated by the company.
If the policy is wrong and needs to be more specific, pay it out this time and change the policy. Don't just break your word.
The policy they think they've implemented is stupid. "Save money in someone else's department" is just going to create a ton of anger as people rush to step on each other's toes, and then those people have to constantly re-justify all the decisions they've made.
I think a good place to start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them. At least then maybe someone will see why it’s quiet, because you’ve anticipated the problems and stopped them before they start.
When things come up with other teams, you’ll have a catalog of tasks that were done to show why you didn’t have the same issue. The work was done, just at a better time to avoid downtime.
> start is tracking all the proactive things being done and reporting them
Speaking from experience, this does nothing. If you're at a company that is okay with average performers, then absolutely, 100%, fix all the bugs in advance, make the system rock solid and stable, prevent downtime, be a good engineer.
If on the other hand if you're at a company where 10% of people must get stack ranked and PIP, or at a company where "meets expectations" actually means you're going to get the stick, and you're supposed to be "redefining" expectations every year ... then yeah, don't do anything preventative. The optics are better when you take the 3am on-call and fix the issue (that you secretly knew in the first place would happen some time in the future in your coworker's code, and already knew how to fix -- but don't actually fix it until it surfaces). Be the savior that the VPs praise in the next meeting, that's your insurance against the PIP.
They set the rules of the game, you just play the game. The rules were their choice. They could have chosen different rules.
True, stack ranking is a terrible management approach, and if you work at a company that does it, then playing the game is the only way. But frankly, I'd be looking to get out anyway. The best way to play thr stack ranking game is to be job hunting.
But I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place. In that case the game is different.
In the case where the "urgent midnight fix" is important, it's necessary to promote the visibility of your (just working) team. If visibility is the game, then be visible.
You know how test-driven-dev was always "write the test first"? In that environment a test is always written before any code.
Well in the "ticket closing" scenario it's important to open a ticket, regardless of how trivial, for every code action taken. For every meeting attended. For every scenario dodged. If tickets are the way to score then write tickets.
If "being a hero" is the valuable thing, then be a hero. Be prepared to champion your team every chance you get. Every time you interact with management stress the emergency you just fixed (before it became an emergency.) Tomorrow do it again with the next thing.
Management needs visibility. Be visible. I know, this seems stupid and beneath you. But that's why they call it a job, not playtime.
> I'm not sure the author of this thread works in such a place
I worked at Amazon, previously.
> Management needs visibility.
I know this very well, and this is a problem. The nature of jobs in any industry is that not all of them are equally visible. As a manager, you should be proactive in assessing the state of things rather than waiting for people to deliver visibility to you. People who deliver "visibility" in spades are often charlatans. People who deliver fixes, code, and improvements in spades usually do not have time to manage their own public relations for your visibility.
However, you have ALL the tools to proactively see what they've been upto. You can attend their standups and other regular meetings, you can set up an updates document, you can see what they've been posting in Slack, you can look at their PRs and commits, you can look at JIRA tickets, and in the age of AI you can have AI explain to you all of the parts of the above that you do not understand.
I refuse to play those games. If they want to fire me for avoiding problems instead of sacrificing my sleep, fine. I’ll go stock shelves at Walmart.
If someone is constantly playing the hero, I see that as incompetence. If the boss can’t see that, they are also incompetent. I have no respect for “leaders” who don’t know how to get out of the firefight.
I’ve made some high profile appearances, working 18 hour days on 4 day long outages, from vendor issues I was no part in causing. I figure that gives me some good will on playing hero without willingly creating problems for myself. I’m too old to manufacture stress for the optics.
For what it’s worth, with the right boss, I have had proper reporting work. Everything ran smooth and work was relaxed. My boss would regularly tell me I should take 3 months off because we were so far ahead of everyone. He would occasionally get bored and lob a grenade into the works to cause some chaos, but since everything else was running so smooth we were able to sort them out and keep going. People who couldn’t explain what they were doing were always getting yelled at and assumed to be doing nothing.
Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been able to pay for my healthcare. A certain toxic company's health insurance paid for my care, though. Prior to joining said toxic company I'd be racking up $6000+ in healthcare bills a year with shitty startup-sponsored insurance.
After 2 years, it was decided I didn't play the hero well enough though, and ended up having to leave. I work for a less toxic company now, but the next time I need a heart-related surgery (likely in ~5-10 years) I'll join a toxic company in the months leading up to pay for it.
The rules of the US, I guess.
> I’m too old to manufacture stress
My point was less about manufacturing artificial stress. I don't do that. But many times I see issues in coworkers' code. If the company will value and praise me for catching and fixing them early, then by all means I'll do that. But if fixing issues in the codebase early for prevention only gets me criticism of "you haven't met expectations, we expect you to exceed expectations every performance cycle" then hell, I don't feel like fixing anything proactively. In that world I'd rather be the hero that fixes it when it surfaces, that's more likely to nail the rating.
Health insurance does complicate things. I hope your heart is doing well now.
I will say my motivation for helping other people avoid issues has dropped. If they want to make problems for themselves, they can. Me helping them hasn’t worked so far, so maybe some sleepless nights will be a better teacher.
I had a former boss call me Brent after reading the Phoenix Project. That made me step back and stop helping so much. Everything seems worse, but whatever… if that’s what they want.
> They set the rules of the game, you just play the game.
Obviously the only winning move here is not to play. Things like stack ranking are a perversion and no amount of compensation would be worth working for a company like that. If you choose to play, you're complicit in the moral abomination.
It's not always a choice when the system increases costs of living to a point where you need to enter a toxic company in order to literally exist, and interview acceptance rates are abysmally low.
If I had enough money that employment is optional, then yeah, I can make that choice, but until then, I'm not complicit.
Isn’t this a universal problem though, not just software industry? Even at home, if one kid just does his thing quietly but another kid is difficult, what do we say? “John has his problems but he is trying, we gotta encourage him”. While his brother gets no praise or attention for just doing his thing quietly without fuss.
When things run smoothly, very few people notice. When things break, everyone notices
Econometricians can solve it, bc we can create rigorous models that map causal inputs to output.
It’s extremely advanced technology, though, and most CEOs would rather rent seek / camp than give up some decision-making power (and very few are even aware it’s possible).
I'd generally point to econometrics and statistics applied to business. The key activity is causal inference and then the context determines the mix of econo vs. stats required to help the org make high-quality decisions to increase output or make it more lucrative or higher-quality.
Ah, yes - the person who comes in at 7AM and gets shit done by 11 is a slacker, and the one in the office just doing nothing after 6PM is the hard worker. Same thing.
You can't fix this. Out of sight, out of mind. It is hard-wired into us. It's all about the optics, and will always be.
> I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.
I disagree with the implied idea here that "engineers are better managers". The solution is to have good management, not to assume that "engineers are better managers". I have seen good and bad managers, and in both groups there were engineers and non-engineers.
This thinking eventually results in The Scream Test. When the screams come as a system fails that is when they act on it.
Alas, for many parts of society there is a large amount of people that would rather be reactive than proactive. It means it is easier today but harder long term.
Managers will let you get away with anything if you time your reports correctly. They also don't want to sit in meetings where they are reminded of better outsourcing alternatives and they chose to dogfeed instead.
We've become too comfortable, since actual toil is no longer seen in the company: Manufacturing is overseas, customer support is overseas, logistics is an afterthought with established guarantees. Thus we want the mild weather and smooth meetings. If your engineering team is too smooth, maybe you should already branch out to help other related but "struggling" teams to get your hands dirty and noticed.
> I've been in those companies where "struggling departments" ended up getting all the praises and raise in budgets the following quarter because of the heroic saves they did, and raising awareness on how important they are... For stuff they totally caused on themselves.
This is a very game-able system, and I'd wager a decent amount that any senior engineers on those teams know exactly what they are doing. In a lot of (broken, but aren't they all) management structures, it's better to be seen to swoop in with the save than to quietly fix it ahead of time.
And if your management is structuring rewards like this, it leads to your seniors anticipating a bunch of these failures, lining up 90% of the fix before hand, so that they can jump on the oncall escalation with a 100% "Hail Mary" of a fix...
Same. I watched a manager fail upwards till he practically ran the entirety of engineering. All his projects failed, got expanded and restarted with more budget and more devs until he ran everything. Meanwhile the teams that actually wrote working services got their budgets frozen and lost headcount.
I guess the point of view is that if a department is well running, it means it is overressourced. So you reduce the ressources until it's breaking point, just enough for it to not fail. A jaded service manager told me it was part of its official training: if the clients was too satisfied that meant that human ressources were wasted on them, so he had to spin plates between clients. I guess it was economically optimal.
I run the media tech at an university solo. Needless to say I am underfunded. But more importantly, the infrastructure was underfunded too. I made it my first policy to also report near misses up the chain with their full implications, e.g. a list of events that we would not have been able to make.
E.g. that time a central media controls power supply broke down which would have made using one of the most prestigious rooms impossible. I fixed it myself by swapping in a spare power supply from a used unit, then went on to remind them twice a year that we are now living on borrowed time and I take no responsibilities if a fault I predict to happen and get no funds to fix will in fact happen. 4 years later I got the funds.
Having stuff costs money. Everybody wants to invest funds once, but nobody wants to keep paying for maintenance.
I feel like this is a cultural symptom and something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare. Basically we treat solving problems as amazing rather than preventing problems. You get rewarded if you treat a sickness instead of keeping a healthy person healthy.
This is the same thing. We need to reward things never going wrong as a society since this is pervasive.
> something many people are hoping to solve in healthcare
Respectfully, the solution is don't smoke, exercise, eat well, sleep, avoid stressors... These aren't easy problems but their solution isn't at the individual patient level and is a simple question of capital and political will.
The 'hope' envisages a product to temporize the solution while extracting large payments.
Nope, I believe you are wrong: a path where we, for example, forbid smoking because the statistics point at it correlating with many health problems, is a world where we use the same statistical tool to prescribe human behavior to the last detail. It is not just about smoking, alcohol, late night dancing, switching sex partners, fast driving on a track, paragliding, skydiving, climbing, car driving, bicycle driving, motor biking, even staying late for astronomical observations (sleep patterns?)... all carry insignificant risk when looked at statistically.
> ...avoid stressors...
Most stress is caused by a conflict between our expectations/motivations and the reality (everyone else's).
> forbid smoking because the statistics point at it correlating with many health problems, is a world where we use the same statistical tool to prescribe human behavior to the last detail.
I had a really great egg for breakfast. This now means I will never eat anything else besides eggs.
Also, I realized that cars run better with oil changes every 3 months or 5,000 miles. Because shorter was better, we should all start changing oil daily.
The best player in the basketball game last week was over 7'4" tall. I guess I need to discourage anyone who isn't that tall from playing ever.
You seem to have inverted the logic: I did not say we have to make everybody smoke, which your examples imply.
My position is: do not ban (make illegal!) everything that has statistically significant risk for one's health (like smoking, alcohol, mountain climbing, spelunking, bike-riding, horse-riding, car racing, NFL...).
So no, I do not see why banning smoking altogether is a good idea (and no, I am not a smoker — I never was either). I can get behind increased health premiums or heavy taxation, banning smoking in communal spaces...
lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers.
I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you back out, someone else needs to step up.
Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every quarter.
The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".
Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.
I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.
I have been on the industry for 35 years. I have seen my share of technology evolutions and o have seen the work from a dozen different dimensions. If after all that time, I find the process painful, just trust me -- they can't change me, and I can't change them. You take the warts with the wins and move on. 2-3 bad weeks, 10 good weeks. Life moves on to next quarter. Complete CEO mindset :)
You heavily implied presentation preparation implies zero productivity. He tried to say this prep is also productive even if you personally don't or can't appreciate it.
I meant my other productivity drops because I am not a natural presenter so even though I am rehearsing / editing for 2 hours a day, the presentation consumes me / overwhelms me that I can't even focus for the remaining 4 hours or 2 hours. Just do the bare minimum email processing, just survive. Everyone knows it. But by being in that zone of paralysis, I can still deliver a presentation. Sometimes good sometimes ok.
I have this need for the presentation content to reside in my memory cache and other work disrupts the cache quite badly.
But that's not a way to live. The other work stalled for 3 weeks.
Which they should. I've been lucky enough to work at places that had great non-technical managers that promoted based on great execution, as well as highly technical managers that also promoted based on great execution.
Now I'm at the other kind of place and it sucks. They'll fire the performative engineers though during layoff season. It's almost like they like playing politics until it really matters.
I believe it's a problem in most industries and even humanity in general. I don't believe it's a business problem at all.
Heroes are lauded even if they solve problems they themselves are the cause of - which is conveniently either forgotten or denied - or they are solving non-issues that are deemed important by the ignorami-class. Politics, for example, is utterly dominated by this dynamic.
It's the first instinct: let the expert run the show. However, one of the (many) ways to let a complex project fall apart completely is to hand over full control to engineers. I'm one myself, but I know what I'm good at and what not. Dunning-Kruger is often mentioned in these discussions, but don't forget it also applies to engineers that often lack any management or leadership experience of any appreciable kind. They vastly overestimate their ability to handle management and organization-wide issues and tend to not only miss the forest for the trees but actually miss the trees for the leaves.
"Unix: A History and a Memoir" by Brian Kernighan actually mentions how proper management was crucial to their success. It's a detail that's frequently conveniently forgotten by the engineers who think themselves better than the "suits". For the record, I don't claim engineers are the primary problem, but it's not just management's either. Quotes like "who holds the company standing" and "who understands how to double click" are enormous smells and IMO make quite clear what's happening here.
I don't have ready-made solutions unfortunately, but I do wish we would look further than "it's the suits". It's a systemic, human problem that I believe is a natural result of operating under informational constraints and, very human, cognitive biases on all sides.
Bell Labs is an outlier in basically every aspect. Mr Kernighan lists stability of the environment with regard to funding, structure, mission as well as technical competence of the management as main drivers of the culture. This is just not the reality in companies that look for financial results on a quarterly basis and where the executives are MBA types.
If one of the most successful engineering organizations in history attributes part of its success to capable management, that undermines simplistic narratives where management is inherently the problem and engineers would naturally thrive if left alone.
If anything, the Bell Labs example supports the idea that exceptional outcomes require both strong technical talent and strong management working together.
Not saying the "MBAs" are helping the situation, but the hero developers and their resume driven development practices aren't exactly angels either.
Capable is the loadbearing word, the directors were all PhDs in math, science and engineering fields.
I dont subscribe to the strawman argument that engineers would naturally strive on their own, but neither does simply any form of management automatically add value.
I agree also that hero type devs are an indicator of problems
>>I'm not sure how we solve this, other than having management come from engineering.
Given the whole point of management is to work to ensure their own survival and growth, it would in their interest to kill genuine competition when its coming up.
Who wants to raise their new competition and lose to them, no one!
There is a natural pace of humans requiring food, water and sleep. The main issue with suspicious AI agents is that they never sleep. So it will take extra-coordination between timezones to ensure we don't let them in.
Fundamentally, until we can really prove we're humans online, open-source has a real problem on its hands. Contributions from people from identities known and consistent before the AI-age are fine, everyone else is suspicious. LGTM is a big risk nowadays.
> Contributions from people from identities known and consistent before the AI-age are fine
Unfortunately, according to the article:
> Giovannini has participated in discussions at least as far back as 2018, and his activity in Bugzilla goes back to at least 2016. He does not appear to have been a particularly active contributor to the project, but his involvement clearly predates the agentic AI era. Whether his account is now being operated by a human attacker, an agentic AI, or a mix of both, it has a legitimate history prior to its recent activity.
So people would have to not only verify the age of Giovanni’s accounts, but judge whether his behaviour was normal.
Not to mention people who are still on the other side nominally in control but send LLM generated patches without declaring them as such.
Then you basically need to review any review from people that might be long term contributors but you don't know personally as new contributor patches, as the code is not from their head & you can't risk them properly reviewing it on their end.
To a degree its will always be a new contributor - an amnesiac LLM prompted to produce the patch with zero memory of any past PRs & lot of entropy in the mix.
This doesn't seem like the right way to do business long terms. The off chance that someone actually take you up on it and pay your 'bill', you've destroyed a lot of goodwill and alerted the rest of the tech world of your scammy moves.
Indeed. Have never used Blacksmith and maybe there’s a good reason why they do this, but it seems odd that in world where so much of the signup and onboarding process is fine tuned for optimal conversion, a business would take an approach to a free trial that risks leaving such a sour taste in a prospect’s mouth.
Also for those that require a credit card for a free trial, I always use a virtual card and cancel it. It's super fun to watch them cry when they can't actually charge you.
Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired.
I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop doing business there because I wasn't really watching anything at that point anyway.
This was around 2022, mind you, so they tried to renew me after several years with no explanation.
This happens with me every year with Barnes and Noble bookstore. I canceled their annual membership back in like 2018, Starting in 2021 this zombie account started charging me for a renewal. I reached out to support and they disavowed any knowledge of how this could happen, had no record of charging me, and no clue how it could have happened.
Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - keep charging you even as your card has changed, they allow the charge.
Every year I do a chargeback, every year. Amex can't figure out how to not allow it and B&N has no idea why they charge it. Hmmm...
A letter from an attorney to B&N’s legal department might be required to get their attention. They are effectively committing wire fraud, so maybe talk to your local
DA?
It's way easier to just not give them a way they can charge you. That way you don't have to deal with a support representative fakely asking you how your weekend was, and who doesn't actually care about your weekend.
I'm surprised this is even a thing. After all, you go to Google not for the truth, but to search Google. Since when is truthiness the "guarantee of service"?
You're not even paying for a google service, search is free... You might be the product, and your data, but you didn't directly pay for a service and they didn't sell you a fake service.
I'm not taking Google's side, this isn't about whether it's right or wrong to rob websites of traffic, this is about AI's returning search metadata.
But I'm surprised that they lost this argument, and the line they took in the first place.
The Internet isn't made of fact checked data, it's crowd sourced. How can anyone be liable?
That is exactly the point of the ruling, though... they are saying that AI summaries are NOT the same as search. If Google was just returning search results, and then users clicked on a website and read the content there, Google is not responsible for the content.
If instead Google gives you an answer right there on google.com, without going to another site, they ARE responsible for it.
Not precisely. The issue at hand isn't just that Google displayed the AI summary, but that they authored it, making them responsible for its contents. If the defamatory content had been in a snippet in the search results, they would've been fine, because that clearly has another author who can be held responsible. The AI summary has no other author than Google; therefore, they're responsible for what it says.
(What's the alternative, after all? Having no one responsible for what the AI summary says is clearly untenable.)
What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.
but if Wikipedia itself writes harmful content such as encouraging people to drink bleach, then wikipedia is liable. Google now generates its own content with AI, that defame others, so Google is liable.
And those tons of websites are liable for their misinformation. It's probably not worth suing some random blog because the author probably doesn't have money or lives in Russia. But Google has lots of money and a legal presence in almost every jurisdiction.
It's why people say "Donald Trump was held civilly liable for sexual assault in the E Jean Carroll case" instead of "Donald Trump raped E Jean Carroll"
That's the difference between returning search results and interpreting the information and summarising them. If a newspaper says 'so-and-so has been arrested for theft' it's not the same as them summarising to 'so-and-so is a thief', the second is potentially libel. Why should Google be held to a different standard?
Google itself is more trustworthy from a normal person perspective as they use it a lot.
None of "AI" companies call their apps "Entertainment fun text generator". They are call them serious names, use words like "intrllegence" and "thinking".
So yeah I'd think if any of "AIs" start to recommend to drink some bleach or take a flight from a 10th floor window these companies should be liable.
I think it's very clear that Google's AI overviews go far beyond just searching Google because they often incorrectly compile sources to come up with an incorrect answer. For example of this look at the comment I made in this thread
The question is whether Google is publishing false claims or relaying other people’s false claims. The court found it to be the former which makes sense to me.
I go to Google to search, but get spammed as if I wanted to talk to a chatbot (and a very poor quality chatbot at that).
This is a gigantic own goal for Google. The average person’s impression is that Google AI is much worse than ChatGPT, even though that’s not actually the case. Google is shoving a terrible model in everyone’s faces.
However there is justice for commenting poorly, there doesn't seem to be justice for posting lies and deceit, which is borderline a serial case here(?).
That question does comes up quite a bit, so I try to occasionally post an in-depth explanation. Maybe I'll do that here.
We can answer the question by rephrasing it. I would put it this way: "is it ok to be wrong on HN"? The key change is to replace charged words like "lies" and "deceit" with the neutral word "wrong".
People do lie and deceive, but to tell that apart from just plain being-wrong requires knowing someone's intent, and this is not something that moderators (or readers in general) can do. Even courts of law have a hard time doing that! HN comments don't contain nearly enough information to decide it. You would have to have a mind reader [1].
Worse, readers are far too quick to assume lies, deceit, etc., in other commenters that they happen to dislike or disagree with. The internet is rife with this, as we all know. Most of these insinuations are imaginary—we are all too inclined to attribute disingenuousness to the other side. One can easily see this by looking at how the same accusations are made against one's own side.
Once the question has been rephrased in this way, it answers itself: of course it's ok to be wrong on HN. How could it not be? Most of us are mostly wrong about most things. Moreover, being wrong is part of eventually getting something right. Curious conversation, which HN exists for, often involves mistakes, and sometimes the mistakes (or seeming mistakes) turn out to be creative.
Even if we decided it was not ok to be wrong, how would we enforce that? We don't have a truth meter [2].
As we have neither a mind reader nor a truth meter, we can't base moderation on anything that requires knowing people's intent or knowing the truth about things. We need criteria that can be decided from people's observable behavior on the site. As I sometimes put it, we can only moderate by effects [3].
That's why HN's guidelines are they way they are (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) - there's nothing in there which requires us to know what someone's intent is, nor whether they are right or wrong on a topic. At least I hope there isn't!
What about the truth, then - do we care about it at all? Of course we do. It's critical! But working out what's true vs. what's false is the province of the community, not the mods. It's the commenters' job to do that, e.g. by answering bad arguments with better ones and false information with true. And they should do this within the site guidelines, e.g. by being respectful and curious rather than aggressive and accusatory.
The moderators' job is to hold the container for this or (if you like) to keep the playing field fair. This isn't possible in any complete way - there are far too many factors pushing things into messy, unsatisfying places. But we do what we can.
Well actually, spacex owned xai is now coding AI in C while earlier it was rust; I guess with the attitude that a language good enough to control rockets is fine for ai.
At this stage just expect that every accounts will get leaked or rooted, it's a matter of when, not if...
Use varying email `plus addressing` (john+am2604@foo.com), varying passwords or passkey and 2FA on anything remotely important (use of your identity, not just financials).
Plus addressing (or movable periods in gmail addresses, etc) is increasingly pointless for a whole host of reasons.
It may keep out the bottom x% of spammers/hackers but it doesn't do much for the increasingly sophisticated scams that are appearing.
If the bit before the + ends up in your inbox anyway then it'll just get stripped off and used. Spammers seeing this kind of thing across several breach dumps:
and will leverage that to target spam at you for other sites, or just email bob@example.com as there's a good chance that'll get through.
Years ago I did a test with my own domain where I created who unique aliases with plus addresses, e.g. steve.smith+iawer@example.com, bob.jones+wpoqe@example.com
It didn't take long for emails to start arriving to steve.smith@example.com and bob.jones@example.com even though that email address had never been used anywhere ever before.
As others have said, you're better off just creating unique emails with `pwgen -s 16` such as wmR5pNhGI8yidU7N@example.com and storing that in your password manager alongside a similarly random password. (Yes, this is roughly what those unique email address services provide.)
Also many services/sites/providers simply assume the username is immutable. $DEITY forbid you might have to change your email address at some point in the future.
I recommend people use proper email aliasing, not plus addressing. Duckduckgo makes a free one that's can integrate into Bitwarden, if you have iCloud+ Apple's($0.99/month) hide my email is good. Addy.io and SimpleLogin are the best and allow PGP encryption to prevent another party having access to your emails, but they are paid for full features.
> Organizations like the IAB require that advertisers normalize email addresses so that they can be correlated and tracked, regardless of users' privacy wishes.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Arch-Linux-AUR-400-Compromised
I toyed with the idea that someone should write a binary that simply emails, or alert you when it's been run... as a canary... and call that `npm`.
At this point, not renaming the npm binary is a big risk.
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