In praise of dissenters: It pays to encourage a variety of opinions
economist.com
economist.com
-- Colonel James G Burton, The Pentagon Wars (1992)
I love it.
Better performance isn't an argument that sways these organizations that care more about preserving the status quo than about success in their stated goals.
Management is easier when everyone just agrees and when Management is easy then Managers are happy, which generally means employees feel less "under the microscope".
Therefore alternative opinions have the appearance of working against both (lazy) Managers and (paranoid) employees. There's only a small percentage of humanity that are either willing, or unaware, enough to potentially get off-side with their boss and peers to provide dissenting opinion. Despite the great long-term value there is in attacking problems with the knowledge of the various angles of entry and exit.
It's sad, but human nature. And here we find ourselves in a world of our own making.
To give an example from a completely different field, I think this might be a big reason behind the problems with the Star Wars prequels: when he made the original movies, George Lucas was a young, new director, and people weren't afraid to tell him no and offer suggestions to improve his ideas. By the time he made the prequels, he was a Legend and of course he was right about everything.
It's important to have people who aren't afraid to criticise your ideas. Even if it makes the people in charge uncomfortable. Or perhaps especially if it makes them uncomfortable.
A good video. I believe the content is largely pulled from a book on the topic, but this is definitely a case where video helps, and if you haven't read or even heard of the book (like me), it's new stuff, not just a rehashing of the same old Star Wars stuff, and interesting from a film school point of view, not just a Star Wars point of view.
I'll also just echo the grandparent post and say that you can see this pattern in a lot of artists: Heinlein, probably JK Rowling (her later books definitely were getting flabby and she's had no comparable success since the original series), all kinds. Hollywood has an interesting pattern where a director makes a huge hit, and they kind of have a defined structure for letting them make a "passion project" before putting them back under some editorial control. The passion projects usually do fairly poorly. I'm not sure what happens if one of them becomes a big hit. That would be interesting to see.
One program I work with has a few clearly defined tasks they've basically mastered. They're very open to my ideas and critiques. Another program was required to overhaul their planning process. It was part of the grant which provided most of their funding. It was harder to debate decisions, because everything needed to move lock-step to make the deadline. It surprised me, because they're usually more receptive to my advice.
They feared failure more than non-optimal success. This can happen in large and small organizations.
"Do you think this project will be successful? Why or why not?"
There is an interesting way to do this anonymously in a larger organization where people don't trust the anonymity of their votes: you can ask everyone to flip a coin and report it in answer to:
"Consider whether the project will be successful (yes/no.) We will survey responses anonymously/statistically. In this way no individual reporting will be known. A single time (don't repeat this for this question), flip a coin. Consider whether the project will be successful (yes/no), then choose one of the two options:
[1] You both think the project will be successful (yes) AND you flipped heads.
[2] You either don't think the project will be successful, or you flipped tails (or both).
In other words, anyone flipping tails must pick 2. So on an individual level, you have plausible deniability, since you can say you support the project but flipped tails.
Statistically, we will measure what percentage below 50 flipped heads, to see how many people think our project will fail."
Due to this methodology, people can voice dissent. In toxic despotic environments, you will have 100% heads. (Which should not be possible, since you can only go below 50% for heads at a statistically significant level, not above.)
I'm not sure what size organization this can work at statistically but it's an interesting method.
If there were some sort of neutral third party (like a non-profit or maybe a union) running the survey I might have some trust, but companies in this space like survey monkey are not neutral, they're beholden to whoever pays them.
By contrast, the two developers with the most experience on paper are very timid, and it's hard to get a straight answer out of them. It's probably a cultural issue. Which makes it extra annoying, because in many situation, it's valuable to have opinions from all cultures represented, and not just the most direct cultures.
- "Strong opinions, weakly held"
- "Clear opinions, openly offered"
It's also good that you are willing to listen to his advice. It sometimes hard for opinions to be heard in conservative environments. It should be the role of a good manager to make sure that everyone is encouraged to share his views, especially those who wouldn't do it naturally.
Sometimes, I'm amazed that so many people simply keep their mouth shut even if they totally disagree with their management or project organization!
I don't want to assume your level or length of experience, but I'm not amazed by this at all. Anyone who has worked in one or more mid-to-large-sized organizations for a few years has either been or seen people punished or fired for expressing dissenting opinion to management. Even, sometimes especially, if that dissenting opinion happens to be correct. If you haven't experienced this yourself, consider yourself lucky you haven't found yourself in such an organization; they are the norm rather than the exception.
The culture has to go beyond making it safe to share opinions, and more to a place of making opinions known to be essential and appreciated, without going overboard.
You don't just lose out on the opportunity to improve, you lose your best developers.
And the way they went about it was just shitty. I suddenly found myself getting blamed for lost productivity because I turned on MySQL's "strict" mode in our QA DB. Apparently it was better to continue allowing MySQL to silently truncate data across the app.
This was my first foray back into a "job" and I've decided it isn't for me. I don't think I'm built for it, I'm going back to working for myself.
Turning on strict mode was wrong - yesterday. The correct thing is to understand why it isn't on, come up with a plan to get strict on, and then convince everybody the plan is correct. This is much harder and takes longer but is correct.
There was time planned for this in that we were updating MariaDB and we had estimated extra time for unforeseen problems.. The defaults changed to strict, I realized we had severe data integrity problems and as the senior developer on the team I made the decision to turn off strict mode in production and turn it on in QA and our dev environments so we can prioritize the integrity of the data.
This is literally my job as a senior developer. If this is not what a senior developer is for in most companies, it goes back to what I said before about not being built for such environments. I made a judgement call here, and I'll continue to defend that judgement call as me doing my damned job.
Maybe in your world data integrity sits behind the newest dropdown on the UI, but not in mine.
But the thing is, everyone was ok with it until about a week later when this VP sent it down the line that I was to be reprimanded for "behavioral" problems because they mistook me asking questions as me not wanting to do the work.
And I got reprimanded, and then the QA environment wasn't changed because this reprimand was insisted on by a VP, my direct manager was forced to do it, and then ignored it afterwards.
I'd rather go back to working for myself than to deal with this shit.
edit: as for why strict mode wasn't on before, this application was developed by an incompetent. To give an example of the level of skill that built this app.
I once came across code the following (psuedocode):
foreach(object)
sql += generate_insert_statement(object).
foreach(part from parts):
sql = "INSERT INTO" + part;
do_query(sql)
My response to a bullshit power play is to use the mobility of my profession to remove myself from the situation.
I will not continue to subject myself to such bullshit just for sake of appearing as if I'm accepting of "dissent".
edit: and yes, I'm still angry about it. Which is part of the reason why I'm leaving. In 20+ years of development I've never experiences something like this, and I refuse to deal with it.
And the entire thing about the DB is a red herring anyways, it was the asking of questions that pissed off a VP that started the entire mudslide.
So you're 4 months in, you made a hasty prod change on a database with very little oversight. That tells me you're neither senior nor someone who can work well with others.
I'm not saying having 'strict' turned off was a good idea, but nobody working at your firm wants to deal with some new unexpected behavior over the weekend caused by some over zealous dev who made some change because he/she believed they were right.
You're making specific claims here that directly contradict what I've stated. I'd list them out, but really I don't want to waste my time on someone who is obviously angry about something unrelated.
This is shooting the messenger, the product was silently failing for god knows how long and your blaming the person that forced the organisation to acknowledge those failures and their own personal incompetence. And they did this in a way that only had an immediate impact on non-production systems.
I get the impressions you can't work well with others, because it requires a good dose of humility and the ability to acknowledge problems. Sweeping those problems under the carpet to bite people in mysterious ways at odd times is someone that's difficult to work with.
And I'm not claiming that there weren't things I could have done better, I've thought about it and I definitely could have done things differently.
But at the end of the day their response was a gross overreaction and was politically motivated. No one had any real problem with my decisions until that email chain.
I.e. the freedom of the dissenters is the measure of freedom in the group.
Of course people who are in favor of the system and benefit from it will never be the one who are censored. But the fact that they are not censored is not a good measure of the freedom in that system.
Freedom of speech means the freedom to say things that other people wish you wouldn't say. Only controversial speech needs protecting, so in a sense, controversial speech is the only kind that freedom of speech is concerned with.
You are more likely to be fired for your suggestion box submission than your idea implemented.
Consider an idea you probably have not heard before.
I come from a blue collar background and went to university to study computer science. I came to the conclusion that Moravec's Paradox means wages must decline for people who process information for a living. The western education system has been against tacit knowledge for political and social reasons - this adds a multiplier to MP.
Society has been rolling with the assumption most working class would join the middle class and information-work led to higher wages. If this is not true then the wages for blue collar can rise over white collar. To a middle class person this is not one of the possible options. I can be wrong - but the consequences of this opinion are not acceptable - they will not be factored into the model.
I present this as controversial but this happened once before in the industrial revolution for a smaller group - middle class used to have servants.
If you are the 21st century's example of a Farmer this idea might bother you.
I don’t consider that controversial at all - I have always believed there will still be plumbers and hairdressers long after the last accountant has been automated away. And those jobs are safe from offshoring too. I wouldn’t advise any young person today to go into “knowledge work”. Lawyers and doctors were smart enough to protect themselves with regulators. But programmers say “hey, anyone can program, it’s easy!”
The middle class is correct that information work is valuable and wrong that it has a high future price. Growing food was and is valuable.
I have fun imagining what happens if everybody found out about MP at the same time. Real trends are slow but the social world could overreact.
Will the herds of goats - former lawnmowers - take over the buildings at Google and Apple? Who will write the book of Exodus when the students flee the universities? Headline: Was Ted Right? Do Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page escape the Seal Teams from the NeoFeudalist government?
One of us must write this post-apocalyptic novel - and you have experience with goats - a future lifeskill.
The article notes that an important factor of success is psychological safety. Makes it rather more difficult to ensure that when you have employees who bear hatred towards roughly 50% of the population.
Are you seriously defending misogyny as a useful character trait?
> skeptical of "climate change"
What does this have to do with the average workplace's diversity?
Either the word misogyny is not used in this sense anymore, or the word "hatred" has changed its meaning. It's too common nowadays to see men being accused of misogyny for poor control of sexual impulses (not necessarily at the time of the accusation, but at any point in the past), or for expressing scepticism about certain political claims of feminists. Whatever that is, it can hardly be described as "hatred".
But surely the same argument should apply to people sharing the current left sociopolitical theory, which uses terminology such as "privilege" (with various qualifiers such as "white privilege", "white male privilege", "straight white male privilege", etc.), or "unconscious bias", which also implies that a certain section of the population should not have an equal voice for merely being who they are. And yet it's not how it works, somehow.
There are well-documented cases when that's patently not true. For example, when "those whose voices are louder", to go with your description, voice an opinion that no-one is stopping others to be as loud as they wish, they are told that their opinion does not count, because they have privilege, and that they should keep quiet and learn. And yes, they may be accused of misogyny (as well as other evils) in the process.
Saying someone's opinion does not count is generally unproductive and needlessly hostile. The only cases where that might be defensible, is if the opinion that's under attack is itself attacking other opinions. For example: if someone claims that women's opinions don't count, I can see how you could argue that such a clearly bigoted opinion is not worthy of attention: it's arguing for the exact situation we should be getting away from.
Another case might be where an opinion is obviously badly informed; sometimes you see people voicing weird opinions based on wrong assumptions about other people they know nothing about, and refuse any correction on those wrong assumptions. (In politics, those misinformed opinions are often still the loudest, though. See the abortion debate for some bizarre examples.) In those cases, shutting up and learning may indeed be the best idea.
But in most cases, all opinions deserve to be heard, and nobody should be excluded from the debate for who or what they are. Of course that also means they shouldn't exclude others for who they are.
The reason why people are afraid of speaking up is because of an excess of "psychological safety", not a deficit. It is because the boss needs to feel "safe". That culture comes from and is for the senior staff.
It is funny because I have seen companies understand this and try to hire a diverse group. But they do everything else in a very rigid, hierarchical way. So most junior people end up leaving, and the senior people go on as before. One particular firm has been doing diverse hiring for close to three decades...their senior staff is still composed of the good old boys who have their come to Christ moment about diversity every few years but never change themselves.
You really have to focus on those senior people to understand this. Everyone says they want diversity, they may even hire diverse...but when a junior person is telling them why they are wrong, they will utterly lose their shit.
I do know places that have comfortably achieved diversity too. But the thinking required is basically antithetical to everything that people are taught about how to behave i.e. think things through for yourself, don't think emotionally, be prepared to be wrong and change your mind when that occurs, etc.