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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Apple's Jim Reekes "engineers are retarded".

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C5d151lqJsA

(The annecdote really starts at 2:30).

Well, he would know about engineers being "retarded". I found him extremely difficult to work with, unwilling to accept that any behavior of his code was a bug, and an all around obnoxious guy.

Haha, what a great video.

To some extent he's onto something. Sometimes you are in this zone when everything will work if you just do this one quick little hack, and then the hack ends up not getting replaced with a proper solution, and in the end you end up with a harddrive right next to a speaker >.<

There actually seem to be people whose default mode of operation seems to lie entirely in that zone though. I'm pretty sure everyone arrives at a similar conclusion if they realise that attempts to fix a certain person's code always end in a express trip to the 6th stage of debugging [1]...

[1]: http://plasmasturm.org/log/6debug/

Definitely. And that "quick hack by default" person will often end up being the favorite of management because they get so many things "done."

So it's important to figure out what kind of manager you have, and try not to be the slow guy on a team full of quick-hack people. You won't look good and nobody will be happy.

> So it's important to figure out what kind of manager you have, and try not to be the slow guy on a team full of quick-hack people. You won't look good and nobody will be happy.

I'd also add that it's important to understand the context in which your team is working.

If I were managing this hypothetical team in a pre-product-market-fit startup I could see the 'slow' person as a potentially greater risk than the others. Not because of speed per se, but because he may be investing too much time in directions that don't help the company learn about their market, and he may be building grand architectural visions that are hard to delete when we realise the product is going in a direction that person didn't anticipate.

On the other hand if I were managing the same hypothetical team in a highly defined context, for example a mature product or an open source library with a large userbase, the 'quick hack' people would need to change their ways.

Obviously this analysis is incredibly shallow and would need a ton of conversation and observation; I'm just making the point that different phases of product market fit require very different approaches & it's worth being aware.

Kent Beck talks about this need for context awareness a lot in his 3x (Explore, Expand, Extract).

https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/the-product-develop...

https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/comparing-explore-e...

Beck could have saved time by following tech strategy legend Simon Wardley ;)

http://blog.gardeviance.org/2012/06/pioneers-settlers-and-to...

Also note that Wardley was pushing past PaaS into serverless and per-function billing back in 2005 with Zimki... lightyears ahead of AWS, until it was designated 'non core' by Canon.

> the slow guy on a team full of quick-hack people

isn't that called 'cultural fit'?

That assessment is best made by the People and Culture team, not you.

We do ourselves a kindness when we skip to step 4.

Except step 5 needs two variants, then: "Oh, I see why it happens" and "Oh, I see that it doesn't, so let's find a way to communicate better with the user".

There are a lot of ways that things can go, but starting out with the disposition that either the bug report is wrong or the other machine is somehow made of worse silicon than our own, is rarely helpful.

However, investigating every bug report while a worthy cause is something not practical for most shops, especially when the underlying cause for these 'only sometimes and only on my machine' issues is some bizarre bug in some underlying dependency or even windows.

Now fixing these issues can often lead to really lean mean software that flies, but if you're in the all too typical situation of overambitious deadlines then you're already in triage mode and long hard fixes are just about the bottom of the pile

> starting out with the disposition [...] is rarely helpful.

Of course, I fully agree. And yet I have witnessed enough developers stating the first stage almost verbatim as a response to a complaint that I grew really quite fond of the link.

It is, actually, quite useful in that regard - it allows you to point out the absurdity of the statement in a humoristic way.

That, and it wouldn't be a good parody of the Kübler-Ross model if it didn't start with Denial :-)

Agreed. The direction I was going is this: If there's a bug report, then there is a problem. The problem might be the bug that was reported, or it might be that you surprised the user/tester in a way that they perceived as being a bug. Obviously something needs to be improved, even if it's just communication with the user, rather than changing the behavior of the program.

That was amazing. I love crotchety grizzled engineers more than anyone I think. This was classic and hilarious. I can't wait to share with everyone at work.

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