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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

In general I'm frustrated that rigor, standards, etc are out the window in favor of all this warm fuzziness. I guess I might be angry...

The culture change in our industry, towards warm fuzzies and away from tech screens, results in calculable waste. Time, money, electricity, customers. We lose good engineers and tell ourselves they were a bad fit. We push crap on users just to sell ads. Then we write engineering posts to brag about fixing our own mistakes. It's a terrible shame and I speak up about it to remind everyone there was a time when RTFM would be the only response to this.

Edit: rate limited but one last thing: are we this forgiving of Equifax when they oopsie our data? Seeing this would immediately make me wonder if anything I have shared with Pinterest is safe. That's why they owe us a postmortem and not a thirst trap.

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> are we this forgiving of Equifax when they oopsie our data?

The kind of culture you're in favor for, blaming engineer for mistakes and punishing them, is exactly what makes the kinda of Equifax mistake possible. Suddenly, people stop to improve things and just do the minimum possible so they can keep their job, since anything else can cause a mistake that will cost your next performance cycle (or even worse, your job).

I know I have certainly left cans of worms close various companies because I knew there was only risk and no reward even though I would have loved to tackle the problem. Fix a major problem working late and weekends and get an attaboy at the weekly conference. Do a good job but introduce a bug that is relatively minor but causes a slight delay in deployment and get on the manager's shit list for the rest of your time there.

I'm talking about blaming and punishing management, not engineers. I'm sorry that wasn't clear.

1. You seem to be projecting a lot of your own thoughts and biases onto this article, and this discussion.

2. RTFM made sense when you wrote code in one terminal window and compiled it in another and then shipped a CD. There is no way you can RTFM for every tool you use at a modern software company. NO ifs ands or buts, it just is not happening. It sounds like you are looking at a nostalgic view of the past, and not understanding the context of the scope and scale of software that is built these days.

3. Engineers should be encouraged to share their learnings with each other to collectively 'raise the tide'. I will never pooh pooh a development team wanting to share their learnings, even if you may or may not think it was a good idea, it may have helped their team or someone reading the article.

4. We've been pushing crap to sell ads since advertising began, grow up and take a longer look, the technology has complicated it, but it's still the same as it always was.

I personally do think there is a systemic problem in companies trying to hire the bare minimum in skills/experience for technical roles and ending up with people operating right at the limit of their abilities (and intermittently being in over their heads).

But do I agree RTFM is frustrating advice for a lot of things. Especially if you aren't going to use such information often enough, so will keep forgetting it anyway and have to start over with the manual each time.

> But do I agree RTFM is frustrating advice for a lot of things. Especially if you aren't going to use such information often enough, so will keep forgetting it anyway and have to start over with the manual each time.

This is related to one of biggest frustrations in the last ten years. We used to master the tool set. But now there are so many tools. Some of them we don't used them often enough. I find myself doing a lot of guessing whereas before I knew what was going on at every step.

> The culture change in our industry, towards warm fuzzies and away from tech screens, results in calculable waste.

I have not noticed, in the past decade, any move away from tech screens whatsoever.

Are we talking about technological screens, like LCD screens here?

I believe they mean screens in the sense of technical interviews to assess candidates' technical ability.

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