Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

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I've been Engineer Alice before (not with a security issue, but a pretty bad systems issue). In case anyone is ever in that situation, here are some more productive replacements for that existential sigh (in that they sometimes work). Choose the one most suited to manager's biases. The cliches are important: think of it as giving manager an easy way to explain it to their manager.

> Yes, but that would only help with this specific case. The proper fix would ensure that we don't see a similar issue tomorrow. We don't want to prepare for yesterday's battle.

> Yes, but the extra regex rule would be new code, which would need its own maintenance in perpetuity. Fixing it properly would let us remove the existing code. Removing code is the most efficient thing an engineer can do, and will save man-hours in the long run.

> Yes, but the extra regex rule has worse runtime performance than the proper fix. [Performance is our big competitive advantage | We don't want to fall behind in performance | We are already behind in performance]. We don't want to create a customer-visible performance regression.

No! The answer is an unequivocal “No“, without any „but“s or anything like that. The fix does not fix the problem, it is not even a fix, just a wrong code change that sets out to do something but does not achieve it.

Answering „yes“ is a lie here. This is different from a fix that fixes the problem in an ugly way, where „yes, but...“ is applicable.

Indeed, and what's worse is that many managers[1] will stop listening after "Yes, ...".

[1] The incompetent ones, of which there are many.

In this specific case (I have never encountered a proposal quite this bad), the correct answer is probably "Give me the proof of concept code and about ten minutes, and I'll give you a version that works despite the patch." You're right about that. "No" is likely to bog down the discussion with "but Bob says it will work", and it's better to skip to the end.

I'm envisioning more of a middle-ground case, where the code is still obviously wrong but it's harder to cleanly demonstrate why.

Sometimes you need an interim solution. A decent organization will be able to manage them by replacing them with actual resolution.

Cisco has a bad track record in that regard and software in general.

My employer has reached a settlement with Cisco after buying their "firepower" solution which has been plagued with basic software and usability bugs.

Ten minutes? How long does it take to type a user agent string into the curl command line?

In my case, a user agent string pretending to be Firefox is already part of my .curlrc, so it's no time at all, just grab the PoC code and fire away. (I've got commented out user-agent lines for a bunch of other browsers that I can uncomment as the need or mood strikes me.)

I'm basically assuming five minutes to read the script, negligible time to change it, and another five to make sure it worked.

You must live in a very nice, ideal world, where simply saying "no, that's not the right way to do it" will convince managers to ignore the pressures placed on them to, at times, value speed over correctness.

What they are saying is that this isn't just "the wrong way to do it". It doesn't actually fix the problem it's supposed to fix, therefore it's actually wrong to say it's a functioning patch.

Of course, but their boss doesn’t know that (or care about it), he just wants to see the fixed bug graph line approach the total bug graphline.

It’ll be totally explainable as engineer failure if something somehow doesn’t work.

Apparently I do? Not sure what you want to hear here, but management does listen to me and my engineering peers. Sometimes things are a bit gray and fuzzy, but in this case here where they definitely are not, I am absolutely certain that there would be no overriding of our arguments.

That's awesome, actually. For me, it's not as bad as Cisco seems, but there are definitely times I get overruled and have to take shortcuts that I'm not always comfortable taking.

How about:

No, it won't actually fix anything, it'll only look like it did for most trivial cases, and 6 hours after releasing it our company will be on the frontpage of Reddit.

I actually said something like that during a meeting. "Yes, you can do it that way, but if someone finds out we will be in the news." This argument worked surprisingly well.

Or you can just do the minimum just like the manager and cruise on the ship until it sinks while surveying for another ship to jump on at the first opportunity.

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