You laugh, but there is a certification very similar to this, except it isn’t a parody, and requires you to make sure all your suppliers have the certification.
One give away that a company is certified is that it forces them to block merging of all unreviewed pull requests (including ones that were revised after last review).
I enjoy these parodies very much, but on a deeper level, we need a good analysis of why this keeps happening. We've had many movements that have aimed for simplicity and commonsense and ended up a bureaucratic nightmare. Is there a way to actually achieve simplicity and commonsense?
I am a fan of making sure each process is necessary to solve a specific problem encountered by this organization, and then periodically revisiting each process to see if the organization still has the problem it addresses.
It's capitalization that turns a pure idea into a bureaucratic nightmare. Other than making someone pay for courses and certificates, how would they prove that they have achieved wisdom? /s
The problem with 'commonsense' is that it's neither a sense, nor terribly common. It is, rather, that sweet spot where intuitions are useful.
Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones.
There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country.
An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions.
Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best.
There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D
Reward individuals for getting things done. Not itself an easy task, but as long as everyone makes roughly the same salary... and as long as those jobs are gated in the first place by credentials and ridiculous interviews...
Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated
> Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated
Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.
Goodhart's Law is that the metric becomes an invalid measure. What I find interesting is the stronger claim, that performance on the thing you were actually trying to encourage will go down.
Invalidating the metric after it becomes a target means that the metric is no longer an indicator of performance, so you have no guarantees that an increase in the metric results in an increase in performance.
In some ways I think it follows trivially from the law: energy has been redirected away from the-thing-you-want and towards the-thing-you-measure.
Unless you think effort spent on the metric increases the total energy of the system, anyway. Personally I would bet it pretty much always decreases it, not even breaking even.
The agile movement is alive and well, and has not become a bureaucratic nightmare.
The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name.
Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.
I love that this website is just Wordpress with the default 2020 theme. Even I did more CSS tweaking when I was building out a business site for my father.
Every company I’ve ever worked at talked about how new hires should be familiar with agile and scrum, and then proceeded to completely ignore either. Then hire coaches to try and make it happen and it didn’t.
It not a knowledge problem, it’s a culture problem.
Walking away is certainly a powerful tool, but it shouldn't be your only tool.
The old maxim is that every human problem has at least two answers: Voice and Exit. Exit is leaving - and you should never take that off the table. But Voice (speaking up, changing the culture around you) is incredibly powerful. Getting good at voice is to get good at leadership.
Strong leaders - at any level in an organisation - can change the culture around them, to a certain extent. For good or ill. Not all culture comes from outside of us. Some, we get to create.
It’s a well known quote by Peter drucker, of management book fame, though I think he disputes its origin slightly. It feels very close to “attitude is everything”.
Unless you've been hired specifically to address a culture problem and been given the resources and powers with which to do so, don't be that guy. All the people who are in your immediate vicinity already know about the problems and they don't have the power to change it either.
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadOne give away that a company is certified is that it forces them to block merging of all unreviewed pull requests (including ones that were revised after last review).
Which is to say, when you make a 'common sense' judgment, you are typically making a judgment based on gut/intuition. You are accessing your onboard neural network, which was trained against the corpus of your entire life, rather than some rule you don't feel in your bones.
There are many problems with this, but for now, let's notice that intuitions honed at one level might not work on another. For example, intuitions about household debt are famously bad intuitions to apply to U.S. federal debt. So looking for e.g. commonsense solutions to the U.S. debt will probably not work -- you simply won't find one that feels right. This is because you (dear reader) are stochastically unlikely to have much experience in running a country.
An analogous problem occurs in software. And what the intuition cannot usefully reason about, it must cede to systems and algorithms, all of which, by definition, feel 'un-intuitive', because they are literally substituting for your nonexistent and/or offtopic intuitions.
Simply put, most peoples' intuition cannot scale, because the training corpus of most people does not include examples of sufficient scale, so they are stuck blindly applying rules and hoping for the best.
There's just no substitute for experience, but scrum afficionados try anyway ;D
Most everywhere I see progress, there's some kind of figure of merit or leaderboard. Yes, optimizing to a metric leads to problems, but it's better than optimizing to nothing. And those problems can be mitigated
https://twitter.com/clumma/status/1329862461151997952
Citation needed. Elsewhere I've seen it claimed that actually, most people want to do a good job, and so any metric ends up doing more harm than good. And half of the suggestions in that twitter thread (keeping the metric private, changing it over time) seem to point in the direction of actually not having a metric and relying on human judgement instead.
Indeed. This is Goodhart’s Law.
Unless you think effort spent on the metric increases the total energy of the system, anyway. Personally I would bet it pretty much always decreases it, not even breaking even.
The Agile movement is a movement which read the agile manifesto, said "Well I can't sell that, but I can sell something else and call it that", but it has little in common with the agile movement except name.
Some of the original agile signatories have moved over to the Agile movement.
http://web.archive.org/web/20230212185150/https://flowmanife...
It not a knowledge problem, it’s a culture problem.
It is incredibly frustrating to join a new team, point out the very obvious misalignment between agile and what they are doing...
and then become assimilated and just march on becoming part of that same culture.
haha this is so true. It basically always happens unless you walk away
The old maxim is that every human problem has at least two answers: Voice and Exit. Exit is leaving - and you should never take that off the table. But Voice (speaking up, changing the culture around you) is incredibly powerful. Getting good at voice is to get good at leadership.
Strong leaders - at any level in an organisation - can change the culture around them, to a certain extent. For good or ill. Not all culture comes from outside of us. Some, we get to create.
Damn, that's a good way of putting it.
This almost made me cry.
Axiom 8 is the most important.
Btw HNers - any here disagree with the 'We believe' page?