> There's an oft told story about Jeff Bezos pausing a meeting to call his own customer service number - and waiting over 10 minutes for an answer.
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.
I work at a (government and extreme bureaucratic) organisation that builds apps used by field engineers.
I found out SSO was broken. They had to login to every app using the same account. Twice per day because the token live was 4 hours "for security".
I found out it was because they published these apps as PWAs, making them more isolated than normal apps.
I asked the product manager and he says the issue is "with Apple and Google", not his department. When asked why he chose PWAs for the apps he said this was easier to deploy, saves them developer accounts and such.
Since I can't force him to change I found a workaround: SSO works in PWAs if you use Edge on a recent Android version on a Samsung tablet. Lucky me we had bought Samsung tablets (this was not a requirement when purchasing I looked it up, just luck).
I asked the Intune manager about this and they said the field engineers should just set Edge as default in stead of Chrome.
When trying this on a company tablet it said: "Edge disabled by X group policy". That guys' department set the policy...
After they removed this I asked why it wasn't the default browser and he said this wasn't possible. I challenged him on this by Googling the Intune manual to set the default browser.
Later they said they had raised a support ticket with Microsoft for this.
On the internal Wiki I found a document describing the problem. It was dated 11 months before I joined.
The short of it is: no one gives a shit about anything but their own paycheck and getting off of work at 5pm.
It's the human condition (and also in part the companies' own fault since they stopped investing in employees)
The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
I envy the people who can give a shit for longer than 2-3 years at any given job. I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I see a fun metaphor for doing the tedious work of arranging a meeting, getting people to join, and getting a solution. Reading it put this way made my day a little brighter. I needed that, too.
Btw, border collies are awesome dogs, and sheep are also awesome. I find no automatic disrespect in using them as stand-ins for our human foibles; intent matters.
One of my first real experiences with Border Collies was at a family reunion. There were a bunch of kids running around playing in the park. At one point someone showed up with a border collie and I watched with delight and amazement as the dog did the herding thing and slowly and carefully pushed the group of children closer together. The kids didn't even realize it until they were way too close to each other to comfortably play tag. The owner called the dog back and the games continued.
Later on I ended up with a sheltie with a very strong herding instinct. She mostly just acted like the Fun Police though with the other dog and cats. Lovely creatures!
Herding sheep is such an interesting experience too. The best way I can describe it is that each sheep has a really large soap bubble around them. You need to push gently on the bubble to get them to go where you want them too. If you push too hard and the bubble pops, they'll scatter and you have to step back and let the bubble reform.
Not much a fan of metaphor? I personally appreciated the way they described about getting (corralling? shepherding? herding? Lots of common animal husbandry expressions in English) all the relevant humans together.
English is full of animal-based metaphors, and that's a pretty innocuous statement. "I herded everyone into a room" does not automatically imply that one perceives those people as animals.
I think the choice of breed has meaning. The border collie is the smartest breed of dog, and its origin is in herding sheep. Calling your coworkers sheep isn't particularly nice. Calling yourself the smartest breed of dog isn't particularly humble. That's why the person you're replying to objects.
Ridiculous. We should be calling people out for being performatively offended. It reduces the impact and gravitas of situations where real offense is given that should be considered.
I have herded cats, sorted sheep, and wrangled cattle all throughout my career. I can come up with more that are quite accurate to the situation.
And I've been the cat, sheep, and cattle likely more than I have been on the other side.
It's simply part of working with groups of humans. We become dumb in groups and lend ourselves towards herd behavior. It often requires someone tending to us to break us of the habit.
That's probably reading too much into the metaphor. I think it's apropos because regardless of whether the others are smart or not, we all have blind sides, and in order to get things done that need to be done you have to apply pressure in the right way to overcome a certain amount of group inertia. Those things still fit with the metaphor without necessarily being disrespectful.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with the word picture that was used. I'd advise against assuming the worst possible interpretation of someone else's words (especially online). Most of us probably do that at least sometimes (present company included), but it would be much better to give people the benefit of the doubt. In this case, I think it is fair to assume that the original poster was just saying that he wouldn't let them try to get away and not actually deal with the problem -- much as a border collie prevents other animals from straying from the group, keeping them where they need to be.
There is no need to assume that they meant that the others in the meeting were less important or less intelligent, or whatever. They were, perhaps, just less interested in dealing with the problem.
> I suppose being your own boss is one of the few ways to stay passionate and care about something for a long enough period of time.
I run a business and the passion is still hard to maintain. On Friday one of my customers cussed me out for 20 mins because I took a few hours to respond. That was a tough way to start the weekend.
It’s a problem of motivation. Now, if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime. So where's
the motivation? And here's another thing, Bob. I have eight different bosses right now!
You can take it up with your manager that you saved 10 minutes of time per day for 2000 workers, equivalent to 8333 work hours per year, equivalent to $2M USD per year, and argue that this value you bring should be reflected in your salary. You can also add it to your CV, to make you more attractive to other employers. Ultimately, you will have to make an effort to convince others of your value if you want a higher salary.
> The people who give a shit and are passionate eventually join the other 99.9%, because it's absolutely exhausting pulling the cart with 10 freeloaders on it who don't care.
It's not that for me. It's learning that the company is a bunch of hot air, all the mission statements and corporate values are total bullshit and only the bottom line matters. The rest is just pr for morale. The leadership doesn't care about anything and will kick us to the kerb whenever it's convenient for them.
Once you look through that bullshit all passion disappears and you just do as little as possible like all the others.
Well, some of us might get promoted if they are a good little drone but I'm not management material so I'm just finding a quiet corner where I can collect my salary with the least amount of work. And just fake all the enthusiasm. Just get AI to post some emoji loaded excited comments when there's an all hands teams meeting.
Anyway that's what turned me off giving a fuck. I did use to care too. Sometimes I still do but it's because I have some project I actually find interesting on a personal/technical level. But most of the work is cutting through bullshit red tape that other teams have made up for us. I'm just caring about my personal development now.
I once worked in a government agency where 4 employees used a app that on ran on IE6. So the rest of the 2000 strong organization had to use chrome by remote desktop into a server.
Decision tree: Does any department still use IE6? Yes -> lets setup a Remote Desktop cluster so the rest can use Chrome
I’m so tired of the “nothing ever happens” crowd. Y’all are absolutely exhausting and add nothing positive to the conversation. Assuming everyone on the internet is lying makes as little sense as assuming nobody on the internet is lying.
Edit: I guess I misunderstood the parent (look in the replies). I hate the phenomenon I’m describing so I’ll leave the comment but I don’t want to besmirch caminante’s good name!
life is too short to spend it drowning in misinformation. Calling someone out on a technical failure is 100% legit. How is it "aggressive" if they're clearly wrong?
I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point, especially when the C-suite is full of founders (or maybe that’s worse?). I can understand how people want to make their bosses happy, and that can cascade into constant bullshitting, but at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
The U.S. Nuclear Navy, for all of its many flaws, gets this right. Generally at least once a year, the head of Naval Reactors - a four-star Admiral - tours every vessel, which may include a brief underway period. During this tour, the Admiral will talk to the engine room watchstanders, with all senior leadership removed. They’ll ask how daily life is, what they find challenging or annoying, what they like, etc. There’s obviously a lot of self-filtering (though sometimes not - Navy Nukes are not known for their social graces) that occurs, and also what a junior watchstander finds annoying may just be a required part of the job, but some useful signal is gathered.
Even outside of the nuclear program, one standout example was Admiral Zumwalt, who as Chief of Naval Operations implemented 70 different changes over his tenure as a direct result of talking to sailors, all of which were designed to improve quality of life, efficiency, or communication.
The truth is you can't get anyone to do what you want. You can try to make them do what you want but they're someone else in the end. Sir Walter Raleigh's beloved friend and lieutenant was Lawrence Kemys. When Raleigh was pardoned and sent back to find El Dorado, the conditions set were that he should not attack the Spaniards. He goes out to South America, and puts a detachment ashore led by his close friend and confidant - as aligned a person as you can imagine. Kemys attacks a Spanish outpost against express orders, gets Raleigh's son killed, returns to Raleigh to inform him of this, and promptly commits suicide. None of this is going to help Raleigh, though, because the conditions of his pardon now having been violated he is executed as promised.
> at some point why doesn’t the CTO / CEO / etc. say “I’m going to go have conversations with the workers to get their perspective?”
Why would you when all of the reports you're getting from your managers are 5/5 stars and "everything's great". Once an organization gets large enough, the information that reaches C-suite has been filtered through so many layers that it barely resembles reality anymore, even when you remove malice from the equation.
its extremely hard if you're being lied to when your org is so vast that trusting delegated responsible individuals is the realistic way of managing it. Also its probably not going to factor into your bonus.
At my org the CIO knows fuck all about computers. Great guy on a personal level but wouldn't be able to quit Vim even if the lives of his 3 kids depended on it.
He was put there because he was with the company for years before and he led other departments fine.
Since he can't evaluate anything IT related himself he relies on 'advice' from the people beneath him who try to get the most budget for their departments by overstating how important they are.
This layer beneath him is mostly product managers, RTEs etc... (We are SAFE Agile! Developer Velocity, Woohoo!).
They also don't know much about computer and if they do it's very domain specific, such as SAP or so.
These people try to fight for budget by overstating their importance. They demonstrate this by having more apps and more people relying on them.
"Look we handled 2000 support tickets, the company would grind to a halt without us!".
Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
This keeps going on and on. I have 10 years experience as engineer and wanted to see "the other side" but it's so exhausting.
A few months back a 'privacy officer' asked why the first and last names of our employees were in the Active Directory and ordered them to reduce the privacy risks.
They failed to specify what risks. Couldn't articulate them even when asked. They also didn't say when the risk would've been reduced 'enough'.
The team was panicking as they were now 'non-compliant' with company policy.
I had to intervene personally to make sure this single directive didn't derail our entire company.
> Never mind that having 2000 support tickets is a bad thing. And also mostly caused by their shitty apps.
I’m constantly having to fight people to not add new, inactionable alerts as knee-jerk reactions to incidents. I swear the thought process is “an incident happened, we added a new alert - look, we’re proactive!” instead of, you know, fixing the root causes.
When WeTransfer suddenty changed it's policy for AI training last summer the entire CISO department panicked and had the entire website blocked.
In traffic we could see that 12% of the company used the site daily, transferring gigabytes of data between our engineers and contractors.
I asked why we didn't just start paying WeTransfer since it's so widely used and this would solve the problem, too.
They said they should just use the internal SharePoint file sharing tool.
I asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
They said the contractors should just update their policy, and that was the end of the debate.
Last time I spoke to a field engineer he said they mostly use private mailboxes now mostly since they "can't even copy something in Outlook anymore" on company laptops.
I decided not to report this to CISO and these docs are workorders and pictures demonstrating workorders have been completed. They're irrelevant one day later.
> asked how this would work since most of WeTransfer use was us receiving docs, not sharing them.
You can do this in sharepoint as well. It's not the best, but you can make a link which is for upload-only to a folder and send it to someone so they can send you files without needing an account themselves.
...if it's not disabled by security policy like almost every other vague useful feature in a microsoft product seems to be by IT organisations.
I once had food poisoning after having sushi with colleagues. They very seriously wanted to have a debate about how we can prevent it from happening again. What? Am I suppose to never eat sushi ever again?
Avoid possibly volatile foods before an important presentation? Understandable.
Avoid sushi for as long as you're employed in this team? Fuck off.
Funny/informative story about this: There was a project, OpenHatch.org c. 2011 that tried to get people to be comfortable enough with programming to contribute to open source projects. In one of the tutorials (I think introducing command-line git?), if you followed the instructions, it would dump you into vim. It hadn't introduced to you vim by that point or explained that's what was happening, so you wouldn't even know enough to google the error. And this was a project that was supposed to be primarily focused on being newbie-friendly!
would you listen to a doctor that could not suture a cut?
how about a mechanic that could not remove a socket from a ratchet?
simple file editing. vi has been around for every. if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
(personal anecdote: once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..)
It's more of a cheap gotcha than a valid test. If we take somebody like me, I learned to code in IDEA/PyCharm, these days mostly code with either Zed or OpenCode, and occasionally drop into nano and Positron. I wouldn't be able to do anything in Neovim without looking it up simply because I had no reason to learn it. A doctor who learned practices appropriate in the 20th century might now necessarily be hired for knowledge of these practices today.
I’d been developing with emacs for years before I learned how to quit vi. Just means he’s never had to change the config on a remote server with a barebones setup :-)
no, its pop quiz bullshit. Oh you know about ":wq"? Well done! But if you don't know, you do it a few times and now you know. It does nothing, outside of teaching you a bit about poor UX.
> if you haven't seen it, and needed it at least once, what have you been doing?
using one of the other available ides?
> once had an engineering VP bring up that a stray ":wq" in a document was a sign of a real engineer...working outside of where he should be..
That's not a sign of good judgement, that's a sign of being technically fashionable. It's hipster shit, akin to rejecting a candidate because they're a fan of Taylor Swift and don't know who the band Tool are.
What distinguishes knowing about vim from knowing about virtually anything else? If you apply to a job in tech, you should know that by long-pressing the power button, your PC turns off. Is this pop quiz shit, too? The bar is ridiculously low these days, apparently.
are you being sarcastic? Its nothing like the power button. Everyone has to press the power button but not everyone has to use Vi.
:wq is one of the most insane key combinations to quit an app and this is just hipster shit where people who use vim think they're the only "real engineers". It's just a disgusting level of arrogance and masturbation. The code is what matters, not the IDE. To focus on it as a sign of technical excellence makes a mockery of what engineers are supposed to care about (comp sci things) and replaces them with all the elegance of a high school bully belittling some other kid for not wearing Nikes.
It's not about using vim, it's about when you had to sudoedit a config on a server you visited the first time, and it had vim as default EDITOR, so you have to know how to exit it and open nano, or whatever you use. It's about exposure, exposure to many small things is a sign of experience, it is experience, to be precise. If they don't know small basic things, it's a sign, they don't have relevant experience. Can also check, if they have empty lines at the end of their files, know how to remove docker images from their machine, or get a TCP/UDP joke.
Its about people wanting to hire themselves. It's a cognitive bias we all suffer from. Being completely unaware of it and purity testing others based on your own experience, is: to be precise, a lack of experience in realising that other people can be just as good as you but took a completely different path to get there.
Nah, I bet they suck, why can't they do what I've already done?
Yes, this is the bias we are looking for. If you can't quit vim, don't know how your frontend communicates with your backend, can't type on a regular qwerty keyboard without looking at letters, or navigate UI without mouse, never used a debugger, don't know how to check if it was DNS, can't write a spec for a feature, after talking to stakeholders (and defend it's priority on their behalf), or don't know how to open dev tools in your browser - you are not ready to herd the cats yet, they will herd you off the cliff instead. And that's okay, you'll get there someday.
Okay, how about having the problem-solving skills to figure out how to exit vim when you inevitably encounter it? Sounds like a reasonable middle ground to me. Do you disagree with this?
I still think you're just trying to hire yourself and its kinda gross. Its like being British and refusing to hire someone that doesn't read or know about theregister.co.uk. Sure, most people probably should but there might be a great dev out there who don't and its extremely cruel to "other" them.
Does vim always happily tell you that its running? It used to be the default diff tool on devices I worked with and IIRC it was just a blank shell in some cases, so it might be non-trivial to work out if you're in it, without knowing it.
So yea, its probably interesting as a challenge but it doesn't prove shit, outside of "you like vim". I like Jetbrains products but I wouldn't assess someone's ability based on how someone might use the products, but rather what they create by using them.
Since you are denying the importance of baseline exposure (consequently accumulated experience), I will just say this: if you are unable to figure out how to quit vim, it absolutely proves quite a lot about your experience. If you do not think that problem-solving skill is valuable, I do not know what to tell you.
Edit: you keep heavily editing your comment so I will leave this as-is. FYI, you are the only one talking about gatekeeping.
I had been sole technical owner for many distributed solutions for industry, as well as responsible for like ~20% of code running my nations transportation infrastructure before I learned how to quit vim. So that makes me think you're full of shit and lack the imagination to consider any other paths except your own.
Are you telling me that when you got vim opened, you panicked and could not figure it out in a relatively short timeframe?
FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools. It is often a good sign, although not a guarantee.
When vim auto opened the bloke next to me doing my induction told me I needed to type ":wq" and then made a joke about how unintuitive it is.
> FWIW I still maintain the belief that it is usually a decent indicator of whether you have got the experience to work through unfamiliar tools
if you just said that in the first place I'd agree, but that's different. Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done. I'm sure there's been plenty of times where we've been thrust into scenarios where we have to use unfamiliar tech to solve an issue or throw up some infra. However, personally I've never _had_ to use vi, so its not come up, but that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.
> Good engineers are brave and able to just dive into some unknown to get the job done.
I agree. We (I) do it all the time.
Just to circle back on the "pop quiz" point: do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability? I would argue it is more meaningful to be given a task and the space to solve it. To be honest, I do not know how to implement heapsort off the top of my head, but I know how to look up its pseudocode and how it works, and from there, I can translate that into working code.
> that's probably because my background is very much a windows one, not a linux/unix one.
Yes, that explains it. I find no issue with that at all. What matters is the ability to bridge gaps when needed.
> do we agree that asking loosely relevant trivia questions is not the most effective way to assess ability?
yeah. I been interviewing recently and the best interviews are those most like the job, where you either go in on-site and pair with some toy example, or get given some awful existing code and be given an amount of time to achieve a particular goal within that code.
The conversations that fall out of such exercises after they're completed are probably more valuable than the exercise itself.
> I legitimately don’t understand how companies get to this point
The people who start a company care deeply about the problem they're trying to solve.
The first N employees also care - they're willing to risk working for start-up because they can see the potential and want to help.
But then you hire, say, an accountant. The accountant doesn't care about your mission. You are just another client to them. You need someone to staff the phone or sweep the floors or design the logo or whatever. Why should they care? You're not paying them to care, they're not invested in the company nor its success, and they believe nothing they do for the company will change their personal fortunes.
Then, before you know it, you have a couple of floors filled with people who have no incentive to care.
It is incredibly difficult to run an organisation where everyone is mission driven.
It can happen when a leader allows their subordinates to build a Truman Show reality distortion field around them because these leaders fail to ask questions of people on the front lines or in different levels of the organization, talk to actual customers, and try to use the product or service themselves. Trust but verify. Leaders can never allow themselves to be completely isolated from reality mediated entirely by their subordinates.
About 10 years ago now, when what would eventually become Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had just done an internal launch of the first availability domain, as we got ourselves read for public launch late in the year, several senior staff and engineers had to go do a presentation and demonstration of the product to Larry Ellison.
They did trial run after trial run, made sure trying to make sure there were no bugs in the demonstration path. They nailed it, presentation went smoothly, live demonstration just worked. Provisioned a bare metal instance, had it running hosting something within minutes of launch. Larry was suitably impressed, but the thing that most impressed him was that he'd been presented with an end-to-end live demonstration. It had never occurred to any of the folks involved to do it any other way, but apparently all too often, all he ever saw was slide shows from product teams, particularly when things were several months away from public launch.
I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
> I reflect on that situation from time to time, wondering at which stage you sort of go from expecting to see live demonstrations, to slide shows. I assume it just slowly slips away from you, one at a time until you're stuck in the land of "make believe we have a good product".
I used to work a very small org with an 80+ year old CEO. I feel like half the time the slide decks were unchanged and very little was getting done but I'm not sure the CEO noticed. Given the CEO often sidelined those meetings themselves, by having some bizarre senior moments. So what should be a 30m meeting always became a 2hr+ long one. The guy used to be technical but as you describe it had slipped away from him a long time ago and he had failed to delegate effectively.
Those meetings felt like my real job was just theatre for the boss in some sort of quasi-nursing home stage, where we helped them maintain the illusion they were running an entirely functioning business. I half wonder if in my short time there, I was a mug for actually doing any work.
The later part of that quoted passage ends with a possibly rhetorical question.
> ... When was the last time the CEO of the above company called their own customer support line?
So Bezos definitely hasn't done that in a long time. Definitely not in India. So I would say the answer ought to be: a CEO does that or has to do that only until the company becomes too big or has captured a sufficiently entrenched large slice of the market.
At one meeting to build out a new service as a next generation to a flagship AWS service that I worked on, I got to meet all the product leaders and managers.
At that meeting, I realized most of them had never used the product and see their claim to leadership role due to their the ability to manage up and down.
I use the product on my personal projects and I hated it with a passion.
One of my jobs was at a company that had developed at unhealthy amount of bureaucracy and politics. The product barely mattered to some because they were playing internal games of grandstanding, taking credit, and building their empires.
In meetings where were supposed to be talking about product direction and priorities I would some times pull out my phone and open the app to try to demonstrate some real problem with the service. The tone of the meeting would change to panic as certain product leads would try to do anything to stop me from showing what the real product did instead of their neatly prepared slide decks that showed a much nice story for the executives. I became the enemy for showing the actual product instead of their alternate world of KPIs and charts.